Connecting the Ontological and Ontic Dimensions of Technomoral Change: TechnoMorality and Tertiary Retention and Protention

Parallel session

Parallel session 6

Presentation slot

Track

Track 6: Ethics at Scale: Systems, Infrastructures, and Societal Impact

Presenter

Donovan van der Haak is a PhD candidate in Philosophy and Ethics of Technology at Tilburg University, where he is part of the Public Values in the Algorithmic Society (AlgoSoc) programme. His research investigates how technology transforms public and moral values (descriptive technology ethics) and how normative approaches to technology ethics should account for these technology-mediated transformations. His work seeks to bridge ontological conceptions of technology, as developed by classical philosophers of technology such as Martin Heidegger, and empirically informed ontic approaches to studying particular technologies that have emerged since the empirical turn in philosophy of technology. Specifically, he draws on the works of Bernard Stiegler to examine how digital technologies, particularly big data, (cluster) algorithms and artificial intelligence, transform public and moral values in the context of public governance, doing so at both ontic and ontological levels.

Type of presentation

Single paper

Chair

Matthew Dennis

Room

Momentum 2

Abstract

The rise of technology ethics has generated both normative and descriptive approaches to understanding the relation between technology and morality. While normative frameworks focus on how technologies ought to be designed and embedded in society, descriptive theories investigate how moral values, judgments, and practices are themselves conditioned by technology. This paper argues that descriptive theories of technomoral change remain incomplete insofar as they insufficiently account for the relation between technology’s two dimensions: the ontological influence of Technology as Gestell and the ontic mediation of concrete technological artefacts. Drawing on classical and empirical philosophy of technology, the paper critically reassesses classical thinkers such as Heidegger for underestimating the multistability and mediating role of technics, and empirical philosophers of technology for neglecting how Techno-Logy as Gestell impacts human valuations. To overcome this impasse, the paper mobilizes Stiegler’s and Hui’s extension of Husserlian time-consciousness through the concepts of tertiary retention and protention, which capture how the exteriorization of memory and anticipation systems co-structure human experience. On this basis, the paper advances the concept of a doubly technological ‘technomorality’ to describe the co-constitutive relation between instrumental rationality and technics in shaping moral life. This framework enables a more systematic understanding of contemporary technomoral change, particularly in contexts such as algorithmic governance, where ontological and ontic dimensions of technology are deeply intertwined. A case-study on the local municipal use of data and AI demonstrates how algorithmic governance becomes moralized, and that shifts in human morality require a recognition of both dimensions of technology.