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MIT271 Technology & Human Values

Explore the intersection of human rights, technological maximality, and individual entitlements as influenced by historical, cultural, and societal values. Examine the implications, challenges, and remedies for ensuring a balance between progress and rights preservation.

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MIT271 Technology & Human Values

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  1. MIT271 Technology & Human Values March 14: Rights

  2. Natural Rights • Either: • God-given • Self-evident moral truths (based on human purposes) • John Locke (1632-1704)

  3. Human rights • Human status, independent of laws or institutions • Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962)

  4. Robert McGinn: Troubling Triad • Technological maximality (TM) • =df Quality of embodying in one of more of its aspects or dimension the greatest scale or highest degree previously attained or currently possible • e.g.? • Individual rights (entitlements) • e.g. life, liberty, property, procreative rights • Increasing numbers of rights-holders (?)

  5. Situations of Technological Maximality • INDIVIDUAL • AGGREGATIVE: • Simple (individually innocuous) • Compound

  6. Individual strength in the triad • Technological Maximality: • Profit • Faith in “technological fix” • Prestige • Gauge of progress • Confusion of quantity and quality • View of nature as homogenous • Democratic consumer culture • Traditional Rights: • Language obscures dependence on prevailing social conditions, and provides “intellectual inertia” • Increasing Numbers

  7. Self-reinforcements in the triad • Reproductive “rights” • TM allows traditional negative rights to be viewed as positive rights

  8. Remedies? • Limit rights holders • Require limiting traditional rights, e.g. mobility, reproduction • Limit TM • Require a conditional conception of rights • (implicit: limiting human rights = changing human rights)

  9. Contextualized Theory of Human Rights • Empirically determinable basis of human needs to survive and thrive • Still functions as a focus to remedy neglect and inequality

  10. Grounds for infringing rights • Survival of society • Effective social functioning • Natural resources vital to society • Debilitating financial cost to a society • Significant cultural, historical, spiritual or aesthetic value to a people • Highly valued social amenity

  11. Compare to Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons” • Similar problem? • Similar solution?

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