Philosophies of Technologies

11Responsibilities System: Ethics of Civic Technology

11.1. Introduction

This chapter presents an approach based on the work of the renowned phenomenologist and proponent of a biological philosophy Hans Jonas in favor of an appropriate ethics for a technological civilization. It then compares networked digital technologies (civic tech) with older technologies that are often thought to be rhetorical, literary and contemporary with the complexification of democracy. Although they date back to antiquity, they are still underdeveloped in today’s innovative debates. This chapter also responds to some of the expectations we might have of a philosophy of technology, which are, at first sight, absent from philosophical debates on democracy and citizenship. It is not just a matter of framing technologies politically, but of also considering the part they play in democracy¹. Similarly, thinking about technology can lead us to revisit forms of philosophical thought, as we present with Jonas and especially Dewey and Simondon.

Some typical cases of broad democratic participation, which were intended to be innovative and took place in France (2019–2022)² and Europe, can illustrate this reasoning.

11.2. Improvisations on Jonasian responsibility

This chapter improvises with different leakage points on the terms of Jonas’ (1991) deceptively simple book title, The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age³.

A first improvisation is the addition of a “responsibilities ...