Does Technology Support Sustainable Development?

With some notable exceptions like James Lovelock, ecologists have tended to charge contemporary technology, not only with destroying the natural environment, but also with an assault on ethical and spiritual values. The recent author best representing this school of thought in Poland has been Henryk Skolimowski, a former Professor of ecological philosophy at Ann Arbor University (USA). Others among Poland’s ecologist-authors, like Andrzej Kiepas or Zbigniew Hull, maintain a more balanced position. In the light of that, the main goal of this text has been the presentation and evaluation of the lack of agreement between Polish and other philosophers and ecological thinkers when it comes to the evaluation of technology. Outlined first is the historical dissonance between philosophers considering the expansion of technology as threatening to humanist or ecological values (e.g. Spengler, Toynbee, Heidegger, Ellul) and those who generally regard it as a factor allowing for progress (Dewey, Hayek, Teilhard de Chardin). Certain distinctions in relation to different branches of technology are then drawn. Today’s military, transport or energy systems are the subject of censure as on the whole unsustainable; while biotechnology as still under discussion. In contrast, telecommunications, especially the Internet, anesthesiology in medicine and the mechanization of domestic labor are all cited as examples of definitively positive technological achievements. To sum up, contemporary technological development is on balance more likely to be seen as advantageous, and capable of supporting sustainable development. However, the criticism of the more extreme dissident intellectuals deserves to be taken seriously. 82 The final question posed here concerns the justification of the sharp distinction widely drawn between technological and moral progress. It seems that, when it comes to technological change for the good of the physical and social framework in which people exercise their immediate moral behavior, connecting people, diminishing suffering and sublimating physical effort, these can also be equated with moral progress.