How To Make Ethical Technology Choices

How should we think about X technology? Is it okay to take the pill? Is it ethical to use AI to help with your homework, as long as you write the final paper? Should you wear a mask? At what point in scrolling social media do you go from taking a break to breaking God’s law?

The fool answers these questions solely based on vibes — as in, their gut instincts comprised of all experiences, feelings, and beliefs up until that point. Some might even call this, “a feeling of peace.” But we can do better.

Sven Nyholm, author of This Is Technology Ethics, does better. He recently outlined two methods of doing technology ethics: ethics by committee and ethics by analogy.

Ethics By Committee

If you’re like me, and you’ve worked within a government bureaucracy, you recoil at the idea of committees. As Nyholm and his conversation partner John Danaher describe, committees fall prey to poor attendance, personality issues (a polite way of saying there are sometimes jerks who dominate conversation), and also a tendency for things to go down a pre-determined path after the first meeting.

But committees really can be good!

In Acts 15, a debate arose between “some men” and Paul and Barnabas. In response, “the apostles and elders met to consider this question.” The text does not say that Paul or Barnabas “felt peace” on the moral issue. And there was no, “you do you,” as if how we live isn’t a matter worthy of discussion.

Their carefulness, rather than hurried adoption, led to clarity. Their decisiveness, rather than indifference, led to convictions upon which the church could grow. And their conversations, rather than isolated individualism, ensured they had the rationale needed to make the right decisions.

In my life, I have seen many Christians debate soteriology, missiology, and apologetics. I have not seen many debate ethics. (Well, except for masks and vaccines, which were good examples of how much Christians can struggle to discuss technology ethics well.)

Christians need to talk to others about the important tech choices they are making before they make them.

Before you download an app, buy a car, install a new dishwater, get a musical instrument for your kid, or ask your doctor for a prescription — before any of that — talk to some Christian friends, church elders, and/or family members.

Yes, use discretion in determining who to discuss this with. But do discuss.

Deliberate. Reflect with others. Start a committee, even. You’re not your own.

Ethics By Analogy

In addition to discussing tech decisions with others, we should use what Nyholm calls, “ethics by analogy.”

There’s a right and wrong way to do this. The wrong way is to simply cite some great invention in the past as justification for some technology in the present. Or likewise, to cite some destructive technology in the past as justification for rejecting something in the present. Here’s what those mistakes sound like,

• Christians should embrace artificial intelligence and leverage it since that’s what the reformers did with the printing press!

• Christians should reject social media just like we’ve learned to reject cigarettes!

Don’t do that.

Rather, consider analogous technologies for the sake of gleaning principles behind the adoption or rejection of previous technologies. Check the principles against Scripture. And then apply them to the technology under consideration. Here’s what that could look like:

• The printing press was a way to proliferate Christian content, hence why the reformers loved it so much. Yes, it introduced opportunities for fake news and propaganda. And it decoupled the church from the Word (which are meant to be built together; see Eph. 2:20). But making the Word accessible, given its food-like necessity to life, was a benefit that outweighed the tradeoffs.

• Generative AI, like ChatGPT, also proliferates content at scale and efficiency with the trade-off of decoupling the human from the content. Already, we see a difference. Further, ChatGPT is not merely a scaling machine that copies efficiently, but rather leverages non-Christian sources and re-introduces them without citation. This practice also introduces questions of plagiarism, accuracy, and trustworthiness!

The goal of ethics by analogy is to uncover principles to guide decisions. And there are many principles to guide us! This is the great difficulty of ethics, balancing the many good principles that might arise. But history is our teacher and should have a seat on our committees.

To handle conflicts between principles, some moral philosophers leverage Reflective Equilibrium, which says you should continually move back and forth between general principles and specific judgements. Generally, spreading Christian content is good. Specifically, it copies everything letter by letter (unlike generative AI). Through this back-and-forth approach, over and over, alongside committees and analogies, you hopefully arrive at a positive result.

I think this kind of reflective and deliberate approach makes sense. But it’s important to note the Christian does not merely study ethics for the sake of doing good, but studies moral theology for the sake of glorifying Jesus.

For the Christian, we not only talk to others and history, but to God. Prayer and Scripture are the guardrails of our moral technological technicalities.

Making the right technology decisions includes much more than I’ve said here, but not less.

Next time you have a technology decision, deliberate with others, compare with history, and pray with your Bible open.

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Links To Things I Liked

I’m considering adding a few links at the end of my Substack articles to things I think deserve a wide reading. This is just testing that out.

Relax, You’re Probably Not Binitarian by Fred Sanders

Claims like, “Christians have forgotten the Holy Spirit,” are overstated. Some Christian preachers and authors have a knack for making people feel guilty about things they ought not feel guilty. Let’s say you go through your whole day praying to God as your Father and you evangelize in the name of Jesus but you never once make mention of the Holy Spirit — listen to Dr. Fred Sanders and relax, you’re probably not a binitarian (as opposed to a Trinitarian).

Writing for a Tier 2 audience by Brad East

Helpful writing advice.

The Experience of Unbelief by Matthew Schultz | Mere Orthodoxy

I’m reading this book right now. Here is a good summary of why I want to read the whole book:

Central to his argument, Minich coins what he calls technoculture—the concrete historical and cultural usage of technology that shapes a human being and his or her relationships with the self, others, and the world. Minich argues that unbelief, particularly a sense of divine absence, arose alongside the profound shifts in work and family that attended industrialization. These first affected the urban working class around the 1860s, where unbelief held equally alongside belief in general society, eventually spreading to the suburban working classes in the 1960s, after which unbelief skyrocketed and shifted in nature.

Beware The Dangers of a Victim Mentality by Akos Balogh | TGC Australia

People can be innocent victims. We can suffer unjust evil at the hands of others. 

But we need to beware of moving from being an innocent victim, to adopting a victim mentality.