Weekly Updates on Research in Energy Ethics
Cover Image Akaza from Koyoharu Gotouge’s Kimetsu No Yaiba, a fan art by Bung Carol
Continuing last week’s issues about real values as the ones towards which we express an affirmative attitude, this week I went deeper into the question of how being aware of the distinction between real values and true values will help us to respond to the values which electricity and/or energy engineering offer to us. How do electricity infrastructures offer values? What if there are more than one value being offered and they are at odds with one another?
These questions are still half-considered by the time this writing appears. But this week’s readings have initiated some intuitions to answer them. We will, therefore, give an example of embedded values offered by electricity infrastructures and then see how we can morally ascertain the offered values.
How Values Are Embedded in Electricity Infrastructures
Technical artefacts in electricity engineering comes not only as a problem solving method, but it does so by emphasising on certain values.
Van de Poel, a renowned philosopher of technology from the Netherlands proposes that values can be embedded into design (van de Poel & Kroes, 2014). This does not amount to saying that the technical artefacts are moral or immoral by themselves since they need to be put in a specific use case for the function to actually take place in human events and can therefore be judged in terms of its morality.
Take a kitchen knife, for example. Among many criterias of a good kitchen knife, among the most valuable ones are sharpness and ease of use: the sharper it is and easier it is to use, the better. Designers can embed sharpness and comfortable handling into the knife, and this is therefore a good and simple example of installing pragmatic values into artefacts.
The same ideas also apply to electricity infrastructures. Take solar panels, for example. Intuitively, we can say that the embedded values in solar panels are renewable (non-exhaustive) resources as opposed to, among others, fossil fuels. The matter of effectively turning sunlight into electricity falls within pragmatic values since it deals with technicalities and empirical problem solving. However, when this technology is mass produced, some other values appear which are at odds with the value of environmental friendliness, such as intermittent energy supply since no electricity can come when the sun is out (this is also addressed as the problem of security of supply). To cope with this shortcoming, storage technologies, e.g. batteries, are developed so that the collected electricity can be distributed during the off-time. That being said, materials for both the panels and the batteries are not only environmentally unfriendly, but also, in some supply sources for battery materials like China, for example, child labor is done to mine the necessary materials.
This here is an example of how a seemingly good technical idea which offers a pragmatic value may come across moral values. Either win/win, compromise, or find an integrated solution via respecifications or in using different techniques and materials (Hoven et al., 2015), value conflict, particularly the moral ones, are important to consider and to solve in any human-related engineering design. This is even so much more so in energy engineering since from its conception down to its implementation, human dimension would be touched in many ways, be it their autonomy, their access to abundant energy, their jobs, and so on.
Appeasing Value Conflict in Engineering
Faced with conflicting values in the engineering of electricity infrastructures, Van de Poel comes up with a series of approaches either by win/win, compromise, or find an integrated solution for the conflicting values. Three of the solutions from Van de Poel which are relevant in the context of electricity infrastructures are satisficing thresholds, respecification and innovation(van de Poel, 2015).
Satisficing is a method in which thresholds are constructed to judge the acceptability of a product. The goal is to see which design will pass all of the minimum criteria without excelling in any of them. Designs which do not meet even one threshold would be rejected, and inversely, it is also possible that good thresholds would require a complete rejection of all products in the category so that either a new product is required or a new threshold standard be applied. This method requires a sharp discretion from the threshold makers ― normally a law or company policy ― and is potentially applicable in morals, i.e. making moral thresholds. The problem, however, is whether or not morality has a clear threshold limit at all, or if one particular moral value is 1) truly moral and 2) applicable to the design context.
Respecification consists of properly conceptualising the relevant values for a design to the point that the language of (moral) values is concretised into concrete design requirements. Conceptualisation is the formulation of values in a way which will make it relevant to the design at hand, while specification is “the translation of a general value or norm into more specific design requirements. The requirement can be more specific with respect to (a) the scope of applicability of the norm, (b) the goals or aims strived for, and (c) actions or means to achieve these aims” (van de Poel, 2015)
And finally, innovation concerns coming up with a completely new technology since the existing value conflict cannot be appeased with the existing technical solutions. Simply put, it is a tech-fix for values conflict. In Van de Poel’s words, “engineering design is able to play this part because most values do not conflict as such, but only in the light of certain technical possibilities and engineering design may be able to change these possibilities” (van de Poel, 2015).
Follow-Up Question
Without denying the importance of the above-mentioned strategic step to appease value conflict in engineering design, the same problematic as last week regarding values and valuing appears, namely, deciding the true values. Stating that there is value conflict assumes that there are some values ― moral, technical, or both ― which are at odds from one another. Furthermore, it also means that sorting out the value conflict is essentially important because not only the opposing values at hand are real values, but also they are truly moral. By that it means that every single one of these values are truly ethical. This problem is better formulated as follows: are each of the values in conflict truly moral?
Laying down this one problem does not necessarily amount to thoroughly understanding what true values or the truly moral is when we deal with engineering practice. It simply means that we need to at least be able to tell that value A proposed by the engineering design or the engineers is truly moral notwithstanding my positive attitude towards the artefacts and its constitutive elements. However, this is already outside of this week’s summary. Discerning what is truly moral or ethical out of all possible values proposed by the engineering design would hopefully be replied in the upcoming philosophical research.
