Technology vs Nature

This book proposes that 21st-century political debates in AI, bioethics, and environmental policy are best understood as occurring along a new political spectrum: a zero-sum conflict between the intrinsic value of nature and technological progress. The political values spectrum is a simple conceptual tool that everyone already knows. However, many modern political debates are not adequately explained by traditional economic or social liberty spectra. Instead, they are better illuminated by this new spectrum, concerning technological mastery over the biology of our bodies, minds, functions and physical environment. By defining the metaphysical opposition of nature and technology, and building an original case for technology's intrinsic value as a form of physical liberty and collective human achievement, this broad work seeks to unify disparate ethical fields, provide clarity in political discourse, and show that the persistent struggles in philosophy of technology, environmental ethics and bioethics to draw a principled line between acceptable and unacceptable technological interventions is in fact a political problem of balancing competing intrinsic goods, not a failure of ethical reasoning.

There can be few subjects as important in our rapidly changing contemporary world as technology and nature. And the two are often seen to be in conflict. But why do we value them? Ben Steyn argues that a key ingredient is missing from our understanding and that this hampers our ability to shape policy; do we regard technology and nature as intrinsically or merely instrumentally significant? This book is a vital contribution to that debate.

David Edmonds, Oxford University, author of Would You Kill the Fat Man? and co-host of Philosophy Bites