The Political Economy of Applied Engineering Ethics: Beyond the Theory/Practice Gap

Applied ethics of technology has reached an impasse. Despite years of work on responsible AI and value-sensitive design, the practical realisation of public interest technologies appears constrained, evident in the rise of technological fascism, the intensifying environmental extraction of rare earth minerals for AI infrastructure under neocolonial conditions, the normalisation of autonomous weapons systems in contemporary armed conflicts, or tech workers facing massive lay-offs and retaliation for organising. Standard critiques attribute this gap to ethics-washing or insufficiently refined ethical theories. This paper argues otherwise: drawing on the field of political economy, we discuss that the theory/practice gap is not a failure of ethical theory but a structural feature of capitalism. Through a re-reading of canonical problems in ethics of technology: the Collingridge dilemma and the Problem of Many Hands, we argue that these frameworks tend to assume an individual ethical subject while obscuring the material conditions (alienation, compulsion, division of labor, profit imperative) that render individual moral agency ineffective.

Part of panel Philosophy of Technology meets Political Economy: Reflections in the context of the Technical University.