BOOK REVIEW: Morality by Design: Technology’s Challenge to Human Values
MORALITY BY DESIGN: TECHNOLOGY’S CHALLENGE TO HUMAN VALUES, by WADE ROWLAND (2019) Bristol: Intellect, 120 pp., ISBN 978-1-78938-1-238, p/bk, $24 Reviewed by Lynne Heller, Adjunct Professor, OCAD University Author Wade Rowland, a professor emeritus from York University, Toronto, Canada titled this book of eleven short essays Morality by Design. However, it was the subtitle – Technology’s Challenge to Human Values – that intrigued me and prompted this review. It is impossible not to wonder about morality and who we are as human beings in the face of overwhelming hype/fear/enchantment...
Read MoreMorality by Design: technology’s challenge to human values
The introduction: How do you build a utopia? What does it take to construct the best of all possible worlds? Thomas More chose the name Utopia (in Greek, it means no-place) for the ideal society he described in his Renaissance masterpiece of 1516, written as a young man long before he served as Lord Chancellor to Henry VIII (and was beheaded for his trouble). The book was a visionary critique of fractious English society which More described as a “conspiracy of the rich,” in which the “greedy, unscrupulous and useless” lived off the labour of others. In Utopia, he sketched a form...
Read MoreAn Essay on the Roots of Morality
Where does morality come from? How can we know which actions are good and which are bad? How do we recognize a good person, a good life? Are there moral rules or standards that apply to everyone, everywhere, all the time? Or are moral standards merely rules of behaviour and customs adopted by a given culture, so that what is right in one society can be wrong in another, and vice-versa. Since René Descartes and succeeding generations of rationalist thinkers, we have attempted to answer questions like these in terms of reason, which Enlightenment philosophers (aggressively rejecting many...
Read MoreAbout Wade Rowland
Ranked among Canada’s leading literary journalists, Wade Davies Rowland has written more than a dozen books on subjects ranging from television journalism, organized crime, and international environmental law to his current concerns, which include communications technology, the philosophy of science, and technology and human values. Full author bio.