# Morality and Technology - The End of the Means
Bruno Latour,
IT IS readily admitted that although human beings pose themselves moral
problems concerning technologies (Should or should we not introduce in
Europe genetically modified organisms? Must we dispose of the waste
from the nuclear industry in deep or surface silos?) the objects in them-
selves do not have a moral dimension. Such is the current view of a large
number of sociologists (Collins and Kusch, 1998). Technologies belong to
the realm of means and morality to the realm of ends, even though, as
Jacques Ellul declared a long time ago, some technologies end up invading
the whole horizon of ends by setting up their own laws, by becoming ‘auto-
nomous’ and no longer merely automatic. Even in this extreme case, it is
maintained, there is no other resource for human beings than to disengage
from this domination by technologies, a domination that is all the more
perverse for not imposing the law of a master but that of an emancipated
slave who does not have the least idea about the moral goals proper to
humankind. We know about the advantage that Heideggerians have drawn
from the idea of a technology that could not be tamed since it was itself
pure mastery without a master (Zimmerman, 1990). To become moral and
human once again, it seems we must always tear ourselves away from instru-
mentality, reaffirm the sovereignty of ends, rediscover Being; in short, we
must bind back the hound of technology to its cage.
http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/downloads/80-MORAL-TECHNOLOGY-GB.pdf
