The Nature Technology Political Spectrum

Abstract

A broad set of public policy debates concern the limits of humanity’s control over nature. Attitudes towards such topics are not well explained by the standard 2-dimensional political model favored by political scientists of i) a left/right economic spectrum and ii) a liberal/authoritarian social spectrum. I pose a new, orthogonal, political spectrum to fill the void. It is a spectrum of value held for, on the one hand, nature, and on the other, technological progress. This harks back to the 18th Century Enlightenment and Romanticism, but manifests again and again, including in recent debates about human enhancement biotechnology.

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Vol.:(0123456789)
Philosophy & Technology (2025) 38:32
https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-025-00852-1
RESEARCH ARTICLE
The Nature Technology Political Spectrum
BenjaminSteyn1
Received: 12 October 2024 / Accepted: 30 January 2025
© The Author(s) 2025
Abstract
A broad set of public policy debates concern the limits of humanity’s control
over nature. Attitudes towards such topics are not well explained by the standard
2-dimensional political model favored by political scientists of i) a left/right eco-
nomic spectrum and ii) a liberal/authoritarian social spectrum. I pose a new, orthog-
onal, political spectrum to fill the void. It is a spectrum of value held for, on the one
hand, nature, and on the other, technological progress. This harks back to the 18th
Century Enlightenment and Romanticism, but manifests again and again, including
in recent debates about human enhancement biotechnology.
Keywords Nature· Technology· Political· Intrinsic value· Spectrum
1 Introduction
There is a jumble of political questions rearing their heads in the twenty-first cen-
tury. Each of these questions has a lively discourse of its own, but no common
thread has been articulated. They are about the limits that ought or ought not to be
placed on human control of nature, and the preservation of natural spaces, objects
and processes. They are questions that have always been part of political discourse
to some extent but have risen in importance now as technological advancement
gives us more and more potential to alter fundamental biology at a macroscopic and
microscopic level, and mimic intelligent processes once thought to be the preserve
of humans. They are questions like, but by no means limited to, the following:
Should we strive for Artificial General intelligence? Is it important to conserve
wildernesses such as forests, jungles and coral reefs? Do we advocate genetic modi-
fication of crops? Should the solution to climate change be predominantly techno-
logical, for instance using geoengineering to alter the weather artificially, or come
from humans reducing their impact on the world? Should we make tweaks to our
own brain chemistry for purposes other than medicine? Should we be able to choose
* Benjamin Steyn
Ben_steyn@hotmail.co.uk
1 Institute ofPhilosophy, School ofAdvanced Study, University ofLondon, London, England
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B.Steyn
32 Page 2 of 25
the colour of our babies’ eyes and hair, and screen it for genetic defects? Should we
be able to change our biological sex? Is it inherently worse to live in a virtual real-
ity simulation? Should we bring back our humanoid relative, the Neanderthal? And
what of cloning human beings? Or growing them outside a womb?
Each of these questions will be pregnant with many considerations of ethi-
cal value, such as for the value of human welfare. For instance, many consider the
existential risks posed by the rapid acceleration of artificial intelligence (e.g., Bos-
trom, 2002); the importance of nature conservation to human health (McKinnon
etal., 2016); and the risks to human welfare posed by not innovating to solve cli-
mate change (IPCC, 2022). Each question will also bear in some way on overtly
political values. What will be the distributional economic impact of allowing human
enhancement technologies to enter a free market (Sparrow, 2016)? What will be the
impact on individual liberty if states wield the power of AI (Müller, 2021)? What
does social media do for the integrity of a community (Gruzd & Haythornthwaite,
2013)? But these questions are also united by one common thread of value consid-
eration. In all cases, these questions evoke visceral, emotional, principled reactions
(both positive and negative) to do with the state of affairs being more natural or,
conversely, more technological. It is these visceral reactions that I will advance that
are telling of a spectrum of value (or disvalue) for these matters in their own right—
a spectrum of value that is political, but nevertheless orthogonal to other standard
political value spectrums of social and economic liberty.
The rest of this paper unpacks this assertion by answering the following
questions:
• What exactly is a political spectrum and why is this a useful concept?
• Is there a political spectrum at play in nature and technology debates, and if so,
what is it like?
• How can a broad set of historical and modern-day debates be explained by a
nature technology political spectrum?
2 Political Spectrums
Science aims to explain phenomena with models, reducing apparent complexity to
a set of fundamental concepts and relations between them, upon which testable pre-
dictions can be made (Hepburn & Hanne, 2021). Some political scientists aim to
reduce the complexity of political attitudes into descriptive models. Rokeach (1973),
Eysenck and Eysenck (1975), and many since (see Todosijevic, 2013 for a full
review) suggest that the fundamental predictors of political attitudes are a set of core
political values, which may or may not be held by some person or group to some
degree. Core values as used here should be broadly understood as intrinsic values,
in the vein of G.E. Moore, where the value is a descriptor of some state-of-affairs
that the holder of the value believes should be brought about in principle, fundamen-
tally, for its own sake, because it makes the world a better place to the degree that
it exists, not merely as an instrument to some further end (Bradley, 2006; Moore,
1903; Steyn, 2024; Zimmerman & Bradley, 2019).
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The Nature Technology Political Spectrum Page 3 of 25 32
Political scientists and laypeople have commonly coalesced around a reduc-
tion of political values into two spectrums, one of economic liberty (or, colloqui-
ally, economic left and right) and the other of social liberty (or authoritarian/
communitarian and libertarian; Curtice & Bryson, 2001; Heywood, 2017). Each
of these values have a long history of conceptual refinement in philosophy, for
instance, J.S. Mill’s liberalism (1859), Karl Marx’s socialism (1848), Isiah Ber-
lin’s distinctions in liberalism (1958), Robert Nozick’s libertarianism (1974), and
Michael Sandel’s communitarianism (1982). We should be parsimonious in posit-
ing new spectrums, lest we want to make political analysis strictly the preserve
of the ivory tower, or so complex that we lose the practical convenience of split-
ting people into fuzzy groups like left-wing and right-wing. But as we endeav-
our to explain and understand our complex political lives the best we can, there
doesn’t seem to be a logical limit on the number of spectrums we should settle,
so long as in adding new spectrums we are adding significant explanatory power.
This explanatory power, in turn, could help a governing body to better understand
voter preferences and contribute to political understanding among the population.
What distinguishes certain values as political (liberty, equality, community,
etc.) as opposed to ethical (loyalty, honesty, compassion, etc.)? Politics is often
said to be about co-operation, negotiation and conflict within and between socie-
ties (Leftwich, 2015). So, we might say political values are just those pertaining
to such activities. But society can come to group decisions and exercise power
relations, channel resources, and cooperate or negotiate over ethical values too.
Ethical values like honesty might also be sought at the level of a general societal
level through state policies and governance (though non-perfectionist accounts
such as John Rawls’s, who argues that liberal states should not pursue ethical val-
ues, would have it otherwise (Wall, 2021). Sleat (2016) argues a distinguishing
feature of political values is that they are values over which there is a need to
come to a consensus. This is certainly part of the answer; however, this emerging
cluster of criteria is still too generous. All the ethical values thus mentioned can
be a source of collective disagreement, and be in competition for our communal
effort, resources, and bandwidth.
Should we simply accept, contrary to common sense, that the class of political
values is large? I propose that we should not. I advance that the unique and distin-
guishing feature of political values is that they are characterised by zero-sum trade-
offs between two opposing values. These antagonistic pairs of values come to define
politics precisely because they pit against each other two prima facie desirable
things, and so create an endless source of tension and argument, unlike, for instance,
an ethical value such as honesty, which is uncontentious.
To illustrate, let’s take the issue of social liberty, with views lying on a spectrum
from libertarianism to authoritarianism. If A strongly values personal freedoms
from the state (i.e., negative liberty), then what she values is logically incompat-
ible with a prescriptive authoritarian state. An increase in negative liberty comes,
by definition, at the expense of state control. Power over individuals is either some-
thing the state has, or something that is more widely decentralised to smaller group-
ings of individuals. Similarly, conferring economic liberty directly opposes the state
management of personal wealth to maintain equality: as Nozick famously declares:
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B.Steyn
32 Page 4 of 25
“liberty upsets patterns” (1974, p. 160), where equality is the extreme case of a pat-
terned wealth distribution.
This type of zero-sum conflict is not just a standard resource allocation problem.
We could suppose that certain political ends like culture, trust, healthcare and secu-
rity are in competition for the same budget. But if there were an infinite budget, there
would be no issues in pursuing them all in extremis. However, the political spectrum
case is different. Even given infinite political power, cooperation, resources, energy
and bandwidth, it would not be possible to pursue both outcomes on either end of
a political value spectrum simultaneously. It is not in fact the scarcity of resources,
bandwidth or power that creates tension within pairs of political values, but rather,
that logical necessity prevents both from being achieved simultaneously. Political
values are political values in virtue of the fact they have a single logically opposite
opponent value. And political debates are those characterised by these pairs of con-
flicting values.
In this paper I would like to propose a third political spectrum pitting an intrinsic
value for nature against an intrinsic value for technological progress. The bulk of
this paper will motivate this political spectrum intuitively with examples of debates
occurring upon it historically and in modern times. But I begin with a sketch of the
underlying axiology and metaphysics.
3 Dening Nature andTechnology
Nature, or naturalness, is commonly defined in environmental ethics as the absence
of human intervention or manipulation in some object or process (Siipi, 2008). Con-
sider some examples of things we intuitively want to call natural: The forest, unlike
the shopping mall, is natural as it is land uncultivated by humans. The hippopota-
mus, unlike the dog, is an animal with a clear evolutionary lineage involving no
human selective breeding. The runner’s speed might be described as talent implying
that it has not been actively cultivated by efforts of a coach or the runner themselves,
but rather it has been endowed by nature.
Artifact, or artificial, is defined as that which is produced or manipulated by
humans. The largest subset of artifacts are technological, those artifacts that have
been intentionally designed with some purpose or function (Dipert, 1993; Hilpinen,
1993; Kroes & Meijers, 2006). Artifacts which are not technological would include
unintentionally created artifacts which serve no expressed function, such as pol-
lution, waste, byproducts and junk. On some definitions, artistic and ornamental
objects do not have a function. A majority of nature and technology philosophers
have accepted that naturalness and artificiality admit of degree (Elliot, 1982, 1992;
Mitcham, 1994; Preston, 2020; Siipi, 2008). This is intuitive. My organic lemon is
more natural than a genetically modified lemon, which in turn is more natural than a
sherbert lemon, but none we might think are as natural as the lemons which grew for
hundreds of years undiscovered in ancient Asia. For a dissenting view, Katz (1997)
argues that the matter is binary, and ‘true nature’ is almost entirely lost.
Defining our terms nature and artifact in terms of the absence or presence of
humans makes them logical opposites and collectively exhaustive of all possibilities
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The Nature Technology Political Spectrum Page 5 of 25 32
that a state of affairs could take. And accepting that the terms can admit of degree,
it follows that all physical matter and all physical processes must lie somewhere
on a continuum between nature and artifact. The process of artifice takes as inputs
objects which can generally be described as less artificial than its outputs. So, arti-
fice reduces the amount of nature in the world, ceteris paribus. Consider also that
technologies (a subset of artifacts) give new functionality to users. Technology
alters, augments, circumvents or replaces natural processes or capabilities. Ceteris
paribus, each technological intervention in, augmentation of, or replacement of a
natural process reduces levels of naturalness.
This sketch of a metaphysical account faces challenges. It is hard to determine
either the relative or absolute position of a given object or process on this contin-
uum. We might intuitively want to say that a rural countryside town is more natural
than a concrete-clad city. Certainly, if we blended up the contents of each and ana-
lysed the resultant mush, the countryside would come out as containing more bio-
mass than the city. But the countryside and its biomass have been subject to a long
history of cultivation by humans—longer than cities. So how then can we say they
are more natural? An account of the natural/artificial status needs to suggest how
we weigh certain types of human manipulation of matter over time and space. That
account is unfortunately not forthcoming.
A second objection to this continuum is that one might argue it is part of human
nature to create artifacts. If true, this leads to contradiction, as then artifacts are in
some sense natural. The premise that it is part of human nature to engage in artifice,
is defended by Jose Ortega y Gasset, who argues “man without technology is not
man” (1961, p. 96). It is intrinsically human to react upon one’s environment, not to
resign himself to the world as it is. Gasset’s argument should be partially resisted. It
is certainly true that some amount of artifice is part of human nature: consider our
opposable thumbs designed for toolmaking, or hunter-gatherers’ firemaking leading
to cooking—digestion outside the body. But to say that it is necessarily in our nature
to engage in artifice always, begs the normative question at stake in this paper. The
extent to which we engage in artifice is an open question. We are at all times both
engaging in it and resisting engaging in it. Gasset’s argument only considers the
instances where we do engage. But we could give an equal and opposite narrative to
explain how the resistance to technology and reverence for nature has come to exist.
Why, for instance, has it taken so long in human history to fly? Thus, current levels
of artifact production (or, the production of any given artifact) could not easily be
said to be the result of an entirely natural process, but rather the relative triumph of
one deep-seated human socio-psychological characteristic (to create) over another
(to leave this as they are).
But turning the nature/artifact metaphysics onto humans themselves raises a third
issue: if all physical material sits on this continuum, this also of course must then
include the physical stuff of human beings (and their constituent parts, their minds,
offspring, excretions, etc.). If we cannot successfully locate human matter on the
continuum, the metaphysics is broken. We might be initially inclined to say humans
are natural. Humans have evolved through natural selection—a process that predates
humans and so, by definition, cannot be an artificial one. The challenge for some-
one who rejects this claim is to state where along the evolutionary lineage artifice
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B.Steyn
32 Page 6 of 25
crept in? We could for instance consider the evolution of some property gained by
human ancestors, (e.g., metacognition), as being where unnaturalness started. But
even this looks like a gradually acquired faculty. For this reason, the idea that the
human retains the property of naturalness is initially attractive.
However, evolution also involves many occurrences of one set of humans making
or modifying another. Most obviously we make one another through reproduction,
and thus successive generations of humans are arguably artifacts of those before
them. There are various other ways in which humans modify and, both literally and
figuratively, make each other: as Simone De-Beauvoir said: “One is not born, but
made a woman” (1989, p. 283). Nurture has a profound physical effect on body and
brain development. We also modify each other’s bodies through physical violence,
applying social pressure to lose weight, or through giving each other haircuts, pierc-
ings, tattoos, amputations and cosmetic surgery. An appeal that these sorts of inter-
actions between humans are not sufficient for artifice seems like special pleading, as
very similar sorts of behaviours performed on non-human subjects most definitely
are artifice, for instance, feeding, shearing, rearing or slaughtering a non-human ani-
mal (e.g., livestock), or cutting a crop of vegetables to make a stew. It seems with
the range of interactions humans have with one another; we can’t avoid being tarred
with the artificial brush.
But humans cannot be purely artificial either. A pure artifact is an impossibility
as anything we call an artifact in the real world must have at some point had natural
inputs. Things we call artifacts day-to-day are things with a high degree of human
involvement. Where we use the label artificial is typically a pragmatic linguistic
choice, relative to context. If we declared humans to be artificial, this would hinder
attempts to consider humans separately to obviously more artificial forms of intel-
ligent agents, for instance, AI or cyborgs, that look soon to become a reality.
The notion that these labels of natural and artificial apply fluidly, not anchored to
any particular metaphysical state of affairs, is reminiscent of the position famously
taken by Donna Haraway in A Cyborg Manifesto (1991). Haraway introduces the
notion of a cyborg to challenge the socially constructed boundaries of, among other
binaries, human and machine. Building on Haraway, the apparatus of a nature/arti-
fact continuum allows us to challenge a strict boundary, but also be more precise
about the relative natural/artificial content of humans, such that we can sensibly
engage in real life twenty-first century debates about whether and to what extent we
become cyborgs, rather than just lumping us together with them in a blurry soup.
Let us say then that humans are semi-natural and semi-artifactual. We are prod-
ucts of nature and nurture. There are elements of our physical makeup and process
that we undergo that are natural and have remained unchanged since the days of our
pre-artifactual ancestors. But we are also to some extent artificial and proceed to
literally make and modify each other’s physical instantiations through our conscious
activity. We don’t necessarily need humans as a species to occupy a single fixed
point on the spectrum. Successive generations of humans, and different instances
within the species at a particular time, might have greater or lesser proportions of
naturalness and artificiality.
This view avoids the problems of the extreme positions. By rejecting that humans
are purely natural objects, the view avoids the contradiction of human reproduction
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The Nature Technology Political Spectrum Page 7 of 25 32
as artifice. It also accepts that some human-on-human behaviour is artifice, while
accepting that some naturalness is preserved in humans, and remains unchanged.
The position also retains the intuitive usage of terminology like human nature and
artificial insemination.
Admittedly though, locating particular humans in an exact spot on the continuum
is a fuzzy and fraught affair, even more so than it is for any other physical object.
But perhaps all that is required for the forthcoming axiological discussion is not an
absolute mapping, but a relative mapping. All we need to say about humans is that
they are somewhere in the middle, and choices we make will pull them up or down,
and in so doing, increase or decrease relative proportions of natural and technologi-
cal value.
In this section, I briefly discussed the metaphysics of artifacts and nature. The
account remains underspecified, but it is nevertheless clear that if we adopt common
conceptions of each term held by prior thinkers in environmental ethics and phi-
losophy of technology, then the terms can be construed as opposites. This will but-
tress the axiological arguments to follow, but it is not strictly necessary. Even if the
underlying metaphysics is underdetermined, we will see that the sentiments and nar-
ratives of those engaged in many policy and ethical debates do nevertheless strongly
imply that nature and technology are commonly understood as opposed.
4 Nature andTechnology’s Intrinsic Value
The claim that nature has intrinsic value has been commonly articulated in late
twentieth century environmental ethics (for a comprehensive taxonomy, see Steyn
(2024)). In the seminal Faking Nature: The Ethics of Environmental Restoration
(1982), Elliot offers a thought-experiment where we are deciding whether to allow
a company to mine a woodland, which involves destroying it, on the condition
that they regrow the wildlife after. His strawman, the Restoration Thesis, says that
this mining is permissible, so long as the wildlife re-grown is of the same amount
and type as before. Elliot thinks the Restoration Thesis is insufficient, likening the
attempt to brand this restoration as nature to a forgery. A forged painting, while
sharing exactly the same physical characteristics as the original, is less valuable. He
concludes that we not only care about the physical characteristics, but also the prov-
enance, history and authenticity of the painting. The restoration thesis is tantamount
to forgery, says Elliot, in faking the proper processes that ought to have produced the
woodland, namely natural ones. Others have followed suit. Kekok Lee (1999) argues
that natural entities (both organisms and inert matter) are more morally consider-
able than artifacts because they possess the value of independence, while artifacts
are created by humans with explicit intention to serve their own interests and ends.
Meanwhile, Holmes Rolston (1986, 2011) argues that what is valuable about natural
entities is their having human-independent evolutionary processes.
The idea that technology has intrinsic disvalue has been discussed by conti-
nental thinkers, where the key line of inquiry concerns technology as a social and
cultural force (Mitcham, 1994, p. 39). Here, in characterising society’s woes, the
view of technology taken tends to be either that it is intrinsically evil, or that it is a
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B.Steyn
32 Page 8 of 25
neutral midwife of the evils of mankind. Most famously, in The Technological Soci-
ety (1969), Jacques Ellul argues that society has come to value instrumental effi-
ciency as an end-in-itself, and this is a fatal misstep which has dehumanised and
destroyed meaning in our lives. Far from being virtuous, the relentless drive towards
efficiency in all areas of life (including manufacture of objects) is a mentality that
makes us fail to observe human freedom, truth, beauty and justice. Ellul is not so
much concerned with the disvalue of technological objects per se, but rather human-
ity’s ‘instrumentalist attitude’ to all things (for similar arguments see also Heidegger
(1977); and more recently; articles by Ihde, Whyte, Gunderson and Clark in the
anthology Kaplan (2017)).
Meanwhile, the idea that technology has positive value, has seen less explicit
axiological attention. As noted by Carl Mitcham (1994), two figures in classi-
cal philosophy of technology stand out for bucking the trend. Friedrich Dessauer,
accomplished German physicist-turned-philosopher, attempted to extend a Kan-
tian philosophical framework by adding a fourth critique: a critique of technologi-
cal making. While Kant argued that scientific knowledge is limited to the world of
appearances, Dessauer (1927) suggests that technological invention allows for direct
contact with a transcendent realm of pre-established solutions to technical problems.
For Dessauer, the pursuit of technology has the character of a Kantian categorical
imperative (Mitcham, 1994). Human participation in creation is a religious experi-
ence; “the greatest earthly experience of mortals” (1927, p. 66).
Mario Bunge (1979, p. 68) also rejects the “romantic wailings” of Ellul and Hei-
degger, arguing for a more extensive application of engineering and scientific modes
of thought into human social affairs. In a sense, he is arguing that technology is
good, but, like other continental theorists, he is not so much interested in technologi-
cal artifacts per se, but about a broader conception of engineering which includes
social engineering (e.g., applied sociology, education, administration), and scientific
theory creation (e.g., systems theory).
However, in contemporary analytical philosophy of technology, positive axiologi-
cal appraisal of technology is entirely missing. In a survey of the field, Philip Brey
notes that “the field would benefit enormously from the development of theories of
value specifically geared towards technology” (2010, p. 44) and that “…very little
work is being done to advance the field of technology ethics theoretically or meth-
odologically” (2010, p. 44).
Some reasons for this omission might be: a) Analytical philosophy of technology
is a young and disparate field, and, as Brey points out, it has recently taken a more
empirical and less normative turn; b) Technology’s instrumental value is so obvious
that proponents of technological progress only need those to advance their cause;
c) Positive valence towards technological progress is misattributed as a value for
scientific knowledge,1 when in fact, science is just the creation of knowledge propo-
sitions, but what we actually value is not merely propositions but the wielding of
1 Schwartz (2020) argues specifically for the intrinsic value of scientific knowledge. More generally,
modern epistemologists have argued for intrinsic epistemic values including for knowledge in general
(Pritchard etal., 2018).
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The Nature Technology Political Spectrum Page 9 of 25 32
them to actually create things in the world; d) Technology tends to command a high
economic valuation, and so is not underappreciated by free market economics rela-
tive to, say, nature and or The Arts. Unlike nature, and somewhat unlike art, technol-
ogy is often created to make money. However, there doesn’t seem to be a relevant
difference in principle; we pay for art and knowledge, though we don’t take these
concepts’ value to be just that which we pay.
There is also an active contemporary discourse around whether technology can
embody the values of its makers. Madeleine Akrich (1992) introduced the notion of
a script, a set of normative expectations and assumptions that are embedded within a
technological object. Akrich and others challenge the commonsense Value Neutral-
ity Thesis: that technology is value neutral, and values are only present in the pro-
ducers and users. This view is typified by the phrase popularised by the American
National Rifle Association that guns don’t kill people, people kill people (Van de
Poel & Kroes, 2014). A much-discussed example posed by Langdon Winner (1980)
is an overpass bridge built by Robert Moses which was intentionally designed to
be extraordinarily low for racist purposes: the low overpass would not allow buses
through, meaning only those who could afford a car could access the beach on the
other side. The thought is that the bridge itself embodies the value (disvalue) of rac-
ism.De Poel and Kroes give another example of a speed bump, which, for them,
embodies a value of human safety. Katz (2005) similarly argues that the evil of the
Nazi death camps was designed into the technological artifacts themselves. For such
philosophers, certain technological objects can have value baked into them and so
be intrinsically evil or good.
I find the evocative examples in this literature, from speed bumps to death camps,
can be equally well explained as holding a very high instrumental (dis)value towards
the particular intrinsically (dis)valuable end in question. That is to say, rather than
being an instance of evil (i.e., an instantiation of an intrinsically disvaluable abstract
property), it is equally well explained as an instrument or means to bringing about
the disvalue. What it seems like they are talking about is the expressive function of
artifacts: certain artifacts like bridges and death camps can be means of expressing
certain intrinsic values, just as an artwork might express a social critique from a
political standpoint.
De Poel and Kroes use the example of a speed bump as having intrinsic value as
it embodies the value of human safety. But this misunderstands the point of intrin-
sic value, that the object is valued for itself. If human safety happened to be better
achieved through other means, let’s say, because it turned out that the speed bumps
did more damage to car’s suspension and increased the likelihood of cars malfunc-
tioning, then it is very odd to assert that the speedbump embodies value for human
safety. Perhaps the faulty speedbump embodies value for human safety… and neg-
ligence? Or does the negligence prove there was no true value for safety in the first
place?
Crucially, it seems that while these philosophers speak of certain technologies
having intrinsic or embodied value, they are not suggesting what I am about to
advance, which is that we add the concept of technology itself to the list of concepts
we might intrinsically value. Rather, their endeavour is about observing more com-
monly held and well understood intrinsic values such as for human life (in the case
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B.Steyn
32 Page 10 of 25
of guns), or racial equality (in the case of the bridge) which they see technological
objects as somehow possessing or rejecting. The axiological analysis of these tech-
nologies finds nothing special about technology per se, it just reduces to the other
intrinsic values that happen to be associated with a cherry-picked selection of par-
ticular instances of technology.
5 Arguments forthesuis generis Intrinsic Value ofTechnology
5.1 Direct Appeal toIntuitions
My friend John was a rocket scientist working on the Mars Rover project. Being
exposed to John’s work convinced me that spacecraft are incredibly cool. As far as I
can tell through introspection, my appreciation of the spacecraft is not shaped by a
narrowly conceived instrumental reasoning that it will serve me. My appreciation of
the spacecraft doesn’t stem from an ambition of mine to go to space, nor particularly
from what I perceive to be spillover benefits to other industries and the economy.
These instrumental benefits might well obtain. But they are not responsible for my
actual state of mind, which is much more powerful and directly appreciative of the
endeavour, in a way I struggle to know how to characterise precisely other than say-
ing: I appreciate it for its own sake.
I want to live in a world where people are endeavouring to build things that allow
us to explore the wider universe. I intrinsically appreciate this state of affairs, and
I admire John’s decision to dedicate his life to helping to realise it. I could say the
same about many other technologies and technologists innovating in areas like archi-
tecture, artificial intelligence, machine learning, synthetic biology, agriculture and
gastronomy. These are things that, on a daily basis, interest, entertain and inspire.
For me then, there is a lot that is intuitively admirable about technological endeav-
ours. But it is difficult to directly argue for this conclusion. One cannot rationally
justify all the way down that any particular concept has intrinsic value suis gen-
eris. The theorists who claim intrinsic value for nature presented no such arguments.
Often, proponents of nature’s intrinsic value simply wrote in a pleasing manner
about nature, and in doing so appealed to the sentiments. And perhaps furthermore
no sufficient rational justification could be given for any intrinsic value beyond just
appealing to intuition (e.g., Crisp, 2005).
Similarly, here, it may well be enough to just baldly assert that technology has
intrinsic value and that is that. For me, these sorts of examples are sufficient. My
intuitions ring out and the most plausible explanation is technology’s intrinsic value.
However, some may want to explain away these examples as being valuable for one
reason or another. Maybe it is a covert form of instrumental value truly at play? A
common strategy to try and show the presence of intrinsic value is to isolate the very
thing that is in question and ask if it is valuable.2
2 For instance, this is the strategy seen in environmental ethics, in Richard Sylvan’s ‘Last Man’ thought
experiment (Routley, 1973). Routley poses a scenario whereby a man commits gratuitous harm to flora
and fauna, but he is the last man on earth in a post-apocalyptic future. Routley intends the reader to intuit
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The Nature Technology Political Spectrum Page 11 of 25 32
There are examples of technology that could feasibly be seen as technology for
technology’s sake. They exist only as instantiations of technological excellence,
with no instrumental value. A literal and figurative toy example is a Rube Goldberg
machine, named after the eponymous American cartoonist, which is a chain reac-
tion contraption made to perform a simple task in an overly complicated and indi-
rect way, famously used by Wallace in the stop-motion cartoon Wallace and Gromit.
Every year, there is a Rube Goldberg machine competition, where there is a large
community of professional builders and junior entrants who revel in the artistry,
comedy, and insanity of ever-more convoluted machines. Watching a Rube Goldberg
machine is interesting, fun and marvellous. It might push similar buttons in you as
watching an artistic performance. It might be right to call the appreciation aesthetic,
but even if it is aesthetic, it is not simply that what I am watching is a sensory pleas-
ure. The appreciation seems to stem from thinking about the craft and engineering
behaviours involved, and the fact that it doesn’t merely set off a bunch of uncon-
nected mechanical processes, but rather, they all connect intimately such that one
can say about the machine that it works. The Rube-Goldberg concept was appropri-
ated by carmaker Honda, whose 2003 advert Cog won many awards (Caird, 2016).
The voiceover said, “isn’t it nice…when things just… work”.
For another example, many people appreciate record-breaking technologies. Per-
ennial bestseller The Guiness Book of World Records (GRW) features a page on the
world’s tallest buildings (GRW, 2016). It is currently the Burj Khalifa, which, at
over 800m, is more than five times the height of the Great Pyramids at Giza and
twice the height of the Empire State Building. I am impressed with the tallest build-
ings even when their technological functions return me no instrumental value—I
might never visit the building but nevertheless be inspired, awestruck, or just merely
quite interested in the fact that it has been built. Perhaps one might argue it has
instrumental value to Dubai as a status symbol of their industrial prowess. Perhaps it
is. But we then in turn may ask why does this confer status? Because there is some-
thing there that is appreciable.
It seems to me that technological endeavours are interesting, salient, inspiring,
awesome, or hold some other property that indicates the presence of value beyond
their means to ends.
5.2 Appeal toPhysical Liberty
Something prima facie odd about the claim that technology is intrinsically valuable
is that technologies exist as instruments. They are explicitly designed to be means to
ends. But to reduce technology’s value to only the instrumental is missing a subtle
but important dimension. What it is missing is that the conferral of technological
liberty is intrinsically valuable, even if not necessarily exercised. To see this, we first
need to make a detour into the political philosophy of liberty. Many philosophers
that it is wrong for the Last Man to harm nature, even if there are no human consequences, and thus,
nature has intrinsic value.
Footnote 2 (continued)
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B.Steyn
32 Page 12 of 25
have argued that liberty is intrinsically valuable. Consider this passage from Isiah
Berlin:
If, as I believe, the ends of men are many, and not all of them are in principle
compatible with each other, then the possibility of conflict—and of tragedy—
can never wholly be eliminated from human life, either personal or social. The
necessity of choosing between absolute claims is then an inescapable charac-
teristic of the human condition. This gives its value to freedom as Action had
conceived of it—as an end in itself, and not as a temporary need, arising out
of our confused notions and disordered lives, a predicament which a panacea
could one day put right. (Berlin, 1958, p. 54)
Amartya Sen progresses this line of thinking across different works using the
concept of an option set—a set of options that are feasible for a person to do in some
situation, that are jointly exhaustive and mutually exclusive in that one must end up
selecting one or other of the options. Sen gives a thought experiment comparing two
scenarios, in one, somebody is starving but has no choice in the matter. In the other,
the person chooses to starve for religious reasons—but could have chosen otherwise.
Both end up in effect with the same life option, but, as the latter’s option set is wider,
their situation is better (1985, p. 201; see also Sen, 1988, p. 270–272).
The key idea for Berlin and Sen is this: over-and-above the content of the choices peo-
ple make, there is intrinsic value in the very fact that they have a choice. There are dissent-
ing views. Gustafsson (2020) and Jones and Sugden (1982) argue that liberty is only ever
instrumentally valuable to the ends that it permits one to follow. As in much political phi-
losophy, there is a difference of opinion about what ought to be valued here, but beyond
a matter of preference and intuition, there doesn’t seem to be a decisive objection against
the claim of the liberals above that it is the liberty itself which is intrinsically valuable.
Returning now to our subject matter, what should be clear is that technologies
expand our liberty (or, as Sen puts it, option-sets) in a unique way. They give us physi-
cal freedoms to manipulate and negotiate the world around us: The freedom to fly, the
freedom to travel at 100mph, to examine objects in microscopic detail, to arrange large
objects, to boil and fry, to explore virtual worlds, to play with simulated characters,
to order a takeaway from one’s phone, to crowdfund a new business venture, to learn
a new skill, etc. With only the functions available to us through our bare bodies, our
physical option set is limited. But with technologies, our option sets vastly expand.
Some aspects of traditional political liberal thought do already touch on physi-
cal liberty. We are concerned with questions of bodily autonomy, freedom of move-
ment, and the rights of citizens not to be incarcerated. But discussion has historically
been limited to one’s use (or lack thereof) of their own body, and not particularly of
the use and functionality of artifacts.3 That said, there is now a growing discourse in
3 That said, it could be interesting for someone to consider how our use of technology brings to bear on
traditional liberal arguments. Consider bodily autonomy arguments around abortion: with the technologi-
cal possibility of incubating a foetus from near conception, does the argument for bodily autonomy still
hold?
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The Nature Technology Political Spectrum Page 13 of 25 32
international development policy around whether access to the internet and digital
technology is becoming a human right (Edwards, 2012; Klang & Murray, 2005). To
me, the notion of some certain piece of technology being sectioned off as being a
right as opposed to others is slightly arbitrary (though maybe all rights-based theo-
ries have this issue), this movement nevertheless shows that many liberals take tech-
nological freedom to be a core part of a good life in the modern era.
Of course, recalling Gustafsson (2020) and Jones and Sugden (1982), one might
dispute that liberty of any kind is intrinsically valuable, saying that any value one
attributes to liberty is ultimately instrumental. For instance, saying that the freedom
to access the internet isn’t inherently good, but just good because it brings about par-
ticular good effects such as social connection, commerce, and entertainment. One
might even go further, in parallel to communitarian critiques of liberalism, and say
that physical liberty is not only not valuable, but harmful, as we ought to be trying to
live similar lives with one another, harmonising our physical option set around a set
of activities rooted in tradition and cultural capital. But I am happy to be partners in
guilt with the other planes of liberty here. I am merely trying to show that physical
liberty is on a par with social and economic liberty, in that for at least some, it could
validly be taken to be an intrinsic value.
Assuming social and economic liberty are intrinsically valuable, have we shown
an argument for technology being intrinsically valuable too? Not quite. All we have
argued for is that physical liberty is intrinsically valuable. Technologies are just
an instrument to the intrinsically valuable physical liberty. A means to achieve the
end of a wider option set. Some modicum of physical liberty is realisable without
technology. We can achieve things in the physical world using our bare bodies and
enlisting the help of others and their bodies. For instance, I am free to experience
what it is like to be 20 feet in the sky by being at the top of a human pyramid. But
notice that beyond the confines of our bare bodies, technology is effectively the only
means of expanding our physical liberty. We can achieve physical liberty beyond our
bodies to the extent that technology is present, and only in the ways circumscribed
by the particular technologies that are present. In other words, states of affairs that
contain large amounts of physical liberty will very likely contain technology, and
vice-versa. So, while we have not shown functional artifacts themselves to be intrin-
sically valuable, we have identified intrinsic value reliably in the vicinity. Technolo-
gies are the single source of physical liberty beyond the bare human body, and this
liberty, an expanded option set, is intrinsically valuable.
6 The Nature andTechnology Political Spectrum
Accepting one or both of my placeholder arguments for technology’s intrinsic value,
we now move to look at the political spectrum as a whole. These values for nature
and technology are possible to hold, and they are in direct tension with one another.
This makes values for nature and technology of-a-piece with other political values
spectrums. One important check at this point is to consider whether we in fact have
an orthogonal spectrum worth disaggregating from the standard two.
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B.Steyn
32 Page 14 of 25
To this end, consider that there are possible and actual political positions out
there that occupy each octant of this 3 × 3 political space. There are eco-communists
that rejects technology (e.g., Pepper, 1994). There are automated luxury communists
(e.g., Bastani, 2019; Srnicek & Williams, 2015). There are right-libertarians who
respect nature (e.g., Walshe, 2014), and cyberlibertarians who love technology (e.g.,
Dahlberg, 2017). We can imagine a totalitarian, economically centrist state impos-
ing a pro/anti nature or pro/anti tech viewpoint on a populus. And we can imagine
an anarcho-syndicalist group of cyborgs, or a nature-loving anarchic left hippy com-
mune. To labour the point, in the more moderate realm of day-to-day party politics,
we see nature and technology does not cut neatly along party lines. You get con-
servative conservationists, and green left-wingers, etc.
One way of pressing this objection further, despite empirical evidence to the con-
trary, is to say that while these are prima facie distinct positions, there is in fact some
underlying truth, that if political actors were axiologically consistent, they would
realise requires certain positions on nature and technology are entailed by their other
political stances. One strategy might be to observe, as above, that liberty is this com-
mon denominator. The liberal likes social liberty as she likes physical liberty. They
are the same thing. The problem with this objection is we then could make the same
argument to collapse economic and social liberty into one—which would run coun-
ter to large swathes of political theory. There is something notable here that lots of
political values all hinge on one type of freedom or another. But whatever common-
alities there are here exist on a meta level, not at the level of political theory.
Now we have a theoretical spectrum outlined, the next two sections of this paper
illustrate some real-life debates in policy and philosophy where the spectrum helps
to explain what is going on. With these examples in mind, a final section will then
further motivate the spectrum’s usefulness in public policy and philosophy.
7 Historical Origins
The tension I am beginning to describe had a heyday in the 18th Century. The
Enlightenment was a period of unprecedented technological achievement (Porter,
2001). Intellectual and technological innovations were accompanied by a positive
belief in human self-assertiveness, progress and intellectual power. Advancement
wasn’t merely a descriptive fact, but an ideal, and when progress was made, a mat-
ter of great pride (Bristow, 2017). Jean-Jacques Rousseau provides a bridging point
between The Enlightenment and Romanticism. Rousseau’s view of man in the state
of nature is a positive one to which we should strive to return (Bertram, 2020). He
criticised scientists and technologists for distancing man from nature (Ayer, 1986).
Romanticism is notoriously difficult to define, and spans across different subjects
like art, music, literature, philosophy with very little in common (Gorodeisky, 2016;
Lovejoy, 1960). But, in terms of the romantic intellectual outlook, a loose set of
principles are given by Cunningham and Jardine:
the original unity of man and nature in a Golden Age; the subsequent separa-
tion of man from nature and the fragmentation of human faculties; the inter-
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The Nature Technology Political Spectrum Page 15 of 25 32
pretability of the history of the universe in human, spiritual terms; and the pos-
sibility of salvation through the contemplation of nature. (1990, p. 4)
Here, the Golden Age is a reference to the biblical Garden of Eden, a time sym-
bolising man’s living in harmony with nature. Romantics cite the Enlightenment’s
cold-hearted attempt to extort knowledge from nature and its rational, calculating,
analytic and judgemental approach, as responsible for humanity’s fall from grace
(Cunningham & Jardine, 1990). Prominent German romantic Friedrich Schelling’s
Naturphilosophie echoes Rousseau in arguing for the necessity of reuniting man’s
spirit with nature (Heidelberger, 1998). Romantic scholars held an uneasy relation-
ship with scientific inquiry. Romantics preferred a hands-off approach to under-
standing nature, preferring observation of facts with careful and limited experimen-
tation. They thought the Enlightenment approach to science a problematic attempt to
control nature (Bossi & Poggi, 1994, p. xii). Romantic Chemist Sir Humphry Davy
said understanding nature required an attitude of admiration, love and worship (Cun-
ningham & Jardine, 1990).
On occasion, thinkers will allude to the relationship between modern debates and
this historical period. In the realm of literature, Mellor (2020) has drawn parallels
between modern debates about human biotechnology and Mary Shelley’s character
Dr Frankenstein. Bate (1991) and McKusick (2009) have explicitly linked Romantic-
era poetry to the modern ecological movement, inspiring the likes of Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and John Muir. Meanwhile, Steven Pinker writes in
Enlightenment Now (2018), the Enlightenment faith in reason applies equally well
to modern times. However, nobody seems to advance the more forceful claim which
I am advancing in this paper: that there is actually very little about the Enlighten-
ment and Romanticism points of view that is temporally or spatially anchored. If we
completely sever these movements from their historical roots, we can see this same
tension is still alive today.
8 Modern Day Case Studies
8.1 Environmental Policy
Environmental ethicists focussed their defence of nature on issues of environmen-
tal conservation and urbanisation. Policymakers face many such issues in decisions
over the building of new towns, cities, factories, quarries, shopping centres and
transport links across woodlands, plains or mountain ranges. The defining feature
of urbanity is immersion in technology. Urban environments are where technologies
thrive. Conversely, rural life is defined in part by a strong relationship with the natu-
ral environment. As noted above, whether rural life is in fact metaphysically more
natural than a city is hard to answer, but there is certainly a narrative and belief that
it is a life closer to nature. Of course, some go further than rurality in search of a
more hardcore nature. Henry David Thoreau, in the seminal book Walden (1908),
and following in his footsteps more recently, Mark Boyle in The Way Home: Tales
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B.Steyn
32 Page 16 of 25
from a Life Without Technology (2019), make their rejection of technology explicit
when they seek to move their lives off grid.
Elsewhere in environmental policy, we can also see the nature/technology tension
in debates over climate change mitigation, historically, in debates around nuclear
energy. Eisenbud (1972) found that the public are disposed against unnatural radio-
activity, for instance, the radioactivity in nuclear facilities, even when radiation lev-
els are lower than in natural instances of radioactivity, for instance, in soils and fos-
sil fuels. More recently, a similar unnaturalness critique is seen in debates around
geoengineering—activities such as routinely pumping a chemical mist into the sky
to simulate the climate-cooling effects of a volcanic eruption. Some offer a techno-
optimistic vision of geoengineering. Meanwhile, others have a principled objection,
not only because it is practically risky, but also because it contributes to a lack of
wildness (read: naturalness; Betz, 2012). The metaphor of playing god, to which we
shall return, arises here. For instance, Hartman (2017) analyses how the metaphor
has been invoked to argue that climate geo-engineering oversteps the proper scope
of human agency.
8.2 Human Enhancement
Perhaps the area of nature/technology debate to receive most attention from ethicists
is human enhancement; the idea that we might actively innovate to enhance human
bodies, not merely as a therapy to mitigate disability, but to take humanity beyond
normal functioning. Paradigmatic examples include genetic and neurological inter-
ventions to increase lifespan, bring new sensory-motor abilities, and alter our per-
sonalities to encourage more empathy and generosity (Juengst & Moseley, 2019).
These technologies are controversial with respect to many axes of value.4 But
one popular debate is focussed on the claim that because human genetic engineering
is unnatural, it therefore is intrinsically wrong. A leading voice on the side against
human enhancement technology is Leon Kass, Chair of the President’s Commit-
tee on Bioethics. Kass has argued in multiple places that our human bodily con-
straints, especially the fact of human finitude, must be maintained for human flour-
ishing (1998, 2003). On the subject of human cloning technologies, which can be
construed as an enhancement or alteration to human’s natural reproductive systems,
Kass argues that cloning personifies our desire fully to control the future, while
being subject to no controls ourselves. “Enchanted and enslaved by the glamour of
technology, we have lost our awe and wonder before the deep mysteries of nature
and of life” (1998, p. 683). Kass appeals to the wisdom of repugnance, arguing that
peoples’ feeling of disgust towards cloning and other human biotechnologies ought
to be treated as an expression of a deep and inarticulable wisdom that it is morally
wrong.
4 For instance, there is a burgeoning public and philosophical debate around the perceived unfairness of
athletic doping (Tolleneer etal., 2013) and similar implications on use of artificial enhancements in soci-
ety at large (Buchanan etal., 2000). Plus, other concerns of practical risks and harms they pose (White-
house etal., 1997).
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The Nature Technology Political Spectrum Page 17 of 25 32
Sandel (2004) takes umbrage with our yielding to the human drive to mastery,
arguing that this may destroy our appreciation of the gifted character of human
powers and achievements. Meanwhile, Annas, advancing the need for a new U.N
treaty to ban species-altering research, argues inheritable genetic alterations and
cloning can be seen as crimes against humanity, in altering the essence of human-
ity itself (Annas et al., 2002). Similarly, Fukuyama believes in some universal
human essence he labels Factor X. He is concerned that human enhancement may
violate Factor X, challenging biological human nature as the appropriate basis of
shared human rights and dignity, and so eroding our sense of common humanity
(Fukuyama, 2002). Those using technology to manipulate natural beings, and in
particular, human beings, are often accused of playing god (Streiffer, 2019). But
others have observed that the emotive force behind the metaphor of playing god
does not depend on a theistic worldview (Lustig, 2013; McKenny, 2009).
On the other hand, proponents of human enhancement, particularly those com-
prising the transhumanism movement, commonly reject the intrinsic significance
given to human nature. They see the above arguments as an unsubstantiated,
bald assertion that human enhancement is wrong because it is unnatural. But, as
Streiffer (2019) suggests, this provides no argument to those who do not already
share the view that unnaturalness equals wrongness. Mandle (2013) notes that,
contrary to Kass, the public are not universally repulsed by human-centred bio-
technologies like cloning. Preston’s (2013) response to Kass’s wisdom of repug-
nance argument is that we just have to get over it. Harris (2009), in arguing we
are morally obliged to innovate on human biotechnology, contests the preoccupa-
tion with nature, noting that famines, floods, droughts, storms are all natural and
all disastrous. Contending that awe and mystery is necessarily wherein value lies,
Caplan (2010) notes that the value of life is not cheapened by understanding how
it works, but rather, like a fine wine or jazz music, it can enhance appreciation.
McConnell (2010) takes aim at arguments given by Fukuyama and Annas,
pointing out that much of these authors’ negative valence to post-humanity is
left unexplained. He challenges us to consider whether losing one’s humanity,
as Fukuyama puts it, is actually such a terrible outcome, particularly when set
against the potential health and wellbeing benefits of human genetic engineering
technologies. He contends that the risk of reductionism of ends Fukuyama sees
is but another instrumental risk and not an intrinsic objection. He also challenges
Annas to specify exactly why the creation of a new species of post-humans is in
and of itself a bad thing.
Glover’s Choosing Children (2006) defends a similar sentiment in the use of bio-
technologies in the specific case of producing designer babies. He argues:
If a good argument showed that some terrible characteristic—which by genetic
means, we could change—was essential to being human, it might be better to
transcend the limits of humanity rather than stay as we are. The idea of what
is essential is a murky one, but, even if it were not, its importance is unclear.
(Glover, 2006, p. 84)
Bostrom (2002) answer to this murkiness is to claim that in fact there are no static
features of humanity at all. Our moral kinship and forms of social organisation have
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B.Steyn
32 Page 18 of 25
changed radically over time, and it is difficult in his view to identify anything we
might want to call an essentially human vulnerability.
For some, the playing god metaphor ought to be abandoned, not saved from its
archaic religious origins. Kaebnick (2013) documents Drew Endy, a leading figure
in the field of synthetic biology, saying that the questions of playing God or not
are so superficial and embarrassingly simple that they’re not going to be useful. Ed
Regis (2008), a science writer and philosopher, calls playing god a trite layman’s
taunt.
We see in the human enhancement naturalness debate the closest hint at an artic-
ulation of intrinsic value for technological progress. Schummer (2009) evaluates the
instrumental case in favour of pursuing synthetic biology (including, we might sug-
gest, on humans) is weak. He contends that the main motivation for it is to prove
the creative power of man, an aspiration which Schummer does not take seriously.
Whether or not we agree with Schummer’s derogatory tone, we can see he is saying
that the appeal of these sorts of technologies is unclear without reference to some
positive intrinsic value proposition (though, in his view, a misguided one).
But beyond the strict confines of analytical philosophy, we can see the intrinsic
value sentiment echoed strongly amongst the Transhumanist movement. Anthropol-
ogist Abou Farman’s On Not Dying (2020) documents those groups seeking immor-
tality. Their faith in technology, he argues, is quasi-religious. It is not merely that
living longer provides some instrumental benefit, it is that conquering death is, for
this group, a triumph of man’s ingenuity over nature. Newton Lee, author of The
Transhumanism Handbook (2019), argues with a positive valence that the fusion of
man and machine is inevitable. One notable proponent of the Transhumanist move-
ment is billionaire co-founder of Paypal, Peter Thiel. A recent interviewer of Thiel
writes extensively about his transhumanism. “Thiel [thinks that] the problem with
transhumanism isn’t that it seeks to remake humanity, but that it isn’t ambitious
enough in this regard” (Harrington, 2022, para.20).
8.3 Biotechnology
What is true of human enhancement broadens out to other applications of biotech-
nology. We now are nearing the technological capability to be able to de-extinct
species by cloning and artificially growing their DNA. Environmental philosopher
Chris Preston gives an explicit illustration of the tension at hand.
These two differing visions capture just a tiny sliver of what is divisive
about de-extinction. One vision contains an uplifting account of human
potential and possibility, the other offers a cautionary tale about exceeding
boundaries and crossing moral lines in the sand. Each vision has legitimate
complaints to make about the other. In one case, the complaint might be,
hubris causes humans to erroneously view themselves as virtually omnipo-
tent. In the other, humanity sees itself as shackled by an unnecessary and
debilitating image entirely of its own making. The truth is clearly more
ambiguous than this bifurcation suggests. We are at the same time both
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The Nature Technology Political Spectrum Page 19 of 25 32
powerful and constrained. We are both part of nature and separate from it.
We are both killers and creators. (Preston, 2015, para.3)
Though Preston ultimately (partially) rejects the first vision in favour of the
second, it is clear from above that he also understands the idea that the first vision
is a valid and competing conception of the good. Had Preston had the conceptual
apparatus I supply here, then we might see him illustrate the debate around de-
extinction as being an instance of the more general political spectrum.
Next, consider ethical debates around the medicalization of pregnancy. The
notion of Playing god is invoked in debates around ways in which technologies
interfere with the natural reproductive process, including sex changes (Walker,
2017), abortion (Kelley, 1993), IVF treatments and embryo research and contra-
ception (Coleman, 1995; Deech, 2006). Some advocate natural childbirth, free
from technological assistance and doctors. Kukla and Wayne (2018) reject the
movement and note how those in this movement often fail to explain why natural
birthing is better just in virtue of its naturalness.
Even if one rejects the presumption in favour of natural birthing, they may not
extend themselves to endorsing (or being agnostic to) the other extreme, which
is the emerging technology of ectogenesis (i.e., an artificial womb outside the
body). Ectogenesis philosopher Anna Smajdor, confesses in an interview that…
When I published my papers on ectogenesis, I had large amounts of hate
mail from right across the spectrum—hate mail from the outright [misogy-
nist] types, hate mail from feminists, hate mail from almost everyone [..]
It seems that when you challenge or threaten this very, very deep-seated
idea about a woman’s role, about the beauty and value of natural childbirth
and motherhood, you stir up some extremely passionate and aggressive
responses in people. (Preskey, 2019, para.19)
8.4 Other Technological Applications
These featured examples are only scratching the surface. We can also consider
everyday divergences in sentiments around GM crops against the organic food
movement, cosmetic surgery vs. a natural beauty ideal, and on issues of the
weight given to naturalness in debates on gender identity.
Lastly, consider a very recent similar divergence in public sentiments on AI,
for instance, on the topic of AI art. Millet etal. (2023) surveyed the public, ask-
ing for their appraisal of pieces of AI and human art (see also Bellaiche etal.
(2023)). They find a pro-human (anti-AI bias), where no matter which piece of
art is in fact human made, they prefer the art that is labelled as human made.
They suggest that people tend to think of creativity as an intrinsically valuable,
and intrinsically natural human, faculty. The authors, meanwhile, see this as a
prejudice that ought to be eliminated, referring to the human bias in a derogatory
fashion, following environmental ethicists, as anthropocentrism.
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B.Steyn
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9 Why istheNature Technology Spectrum Useful?
Drawing together these palpable debates, narratives and stances taken by theo-
rists and the public across environmental policy, industrialisation, human
enhancement, biotechnology, and AI; what we see is a timeless tension. On one
hand, Enlightenment-inspired technophiles want to push humanity’s control over
nature, not only because the instrumental benefits of technology are so high, but
also, when we dig deep down into their psychology, it is also a matter of princi-
ple— an intrinsic value for technological progress. On the other hand, romantic-
inspired nature lovers want to preserve the natural state of things in the environ-
ment, landscape, and human bodies.
From the examples of policy debates above, from geoengineering to ectogen-
esis, it is clear we are concerned here with societal coordination problems involv-
ing use of resources, markets and legislation. It is therefore right to construe our
spectrum as a political spectrum. Conceiving of this as a political spectrum gives
great explanatory power, with a parsimony and simplicity that we take for granted
when describing other political phenomena with ease in terms of (e.g., left-wing
or right-wing). This clarity, in turn, allows voters to better identify the ideologi-
cal positions of political parties, and governing bodies to check the acceptability
of policy. This clarity is vital. The natural world continues to be destroyed at an
alarming rate, while technological progress is rapid. In fighting climate change,
we face major trade-offs in whether we embrace or reject technological solu-
tions. People struggle to articulate exactly why they are uncomfortable with AI
and advanced biotechnology. These debates are likely to continue surging up the
political agenda.
Meanwhile, for philosophers, the spectrum unifies the siloed fields of environ-
mental ethics and philosophy of technology. It helps us recognise where there is
a values-based dispute as distinct from a practical dispute. Where there already
exists pockets of rich debate, for example, on human enhancement, it is help-
ful to identify that the debate is in some sense not unique, but an instance of a
more general phenomenon. Consider an analogy: There is a rich and complex
debate around the merits and demerits of redistributive justice. We can have such
debates without considering in great detail the specific mechanisms of redistribu-
tion, for instance, whether we use income tax, capital gains tax, or corporation
tax. Similarly, here, perhaps we don’t need a specific branch of bioethics deal-
ing with how our general spectrum pertains to human synthetic biology; we just
need the nature/technology spectrum. Some engaged in the human enhancement
debate attempt to draw a Darwinian line in the sand (Preston, 2008) as to what
human traits we can or can’t meddle with (see also, Fukuyama’s X Factor, 2002).
But on the political conception, drawing such delineations would be analogous
to a left-winger believing there is some single rate at which the income tax sud-
denly switches from unfair to fair. The left-winger doesn’t face such absurdities
because the tax debate is carried out at a more general dispositional level. Using
a spectrum alleviates the pressure to draw lines in the sand and allows us to take
intermediate positions without fear of slippery-slope arguments.
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The Nature Technology Political Spectrum Page 21 of 25 32
10 Concluding Remarks
The claim of this paper is that many prima facie esoteric philosophical, ethical, and
policy debates in the once-disparate vicinities of nature and technology can be bet-
ter understood with reference to a simplifying framework: a political spectrum of
intrinsic value covering, on the one hand, value for nature and on the other, a value
for technology. The technology side, though present in the minds of many ordinary
people, has received comparatively little philosophical attention, so I had to front
up an original case for technology’s intrinsic value to contend with many decades
of compelling writing about nature. To make this intrinsic case for technology, I
first appealed to intuitions, using the example of spacecraft—the activity that seems
good to me despite no obvious instrumental benefit. Next, I argued how technology
offers a unique form of liberty, which is analogously valuable to how eminent phi-
losophers like Isiah Berlin and Amartya Sen have argued for other forms of liberty
(social, economic) being valuable. I do not think these are the only arguments that
could be given. I hope others have more to say about technology’s intrinsic value,
and how it relates to nature’s. Gaining clarity will become increasingly important as
the physical matter comprising the world—including human beings themselves—
continues to hurtle along the nature/artifact continuum without any critical reflection
or democratic representation.
Acknowledgements I would like to thank Dr Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij and Dr Barry Maydom at Birkbeck
University of London, Dr Rob Simpson at University College London and Professor Fabienne Peter at
University of Warwick for reviewing and discussing early drafts of this work.
Authors’ Contributions Not applicable, paper entirely the original work of the submitting author.
Funding Not applicable.
Data Availability Not applicable.
Declarations
Ethics Approval and Consent to Participate Not applicable.
Consent for Publication Yes.
Competing Interests Not applicable.
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License,
which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long
as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative
Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this
article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line
to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended
use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permis-
sion directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/
licenses/by/4.0/.
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B.Steyn
32 Page 22 of 25
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