Umbrello’s Technology Ethics provides an introduction to the topic of technology ethics, aimed at engineering students.

After an introduction nominally on technology and society, the next three chapters present three well-known theories of technology. They are (i) instrumentalism, (ii) technological determinism, and (iii) social constructivism. In each of these chapters, Umbrello presents the core theoretical point of view, discusses some of its strengths in terms of what phenomena it can explain, and then discusses some of the limitations of the theory. The next chapter, nominally about the ‘design turn’, presents a fourth theory of technology, interactionalism. Interactionalism, Umbrello argues, avoids the principal problems of the other three views, and has strengths of its own. It is the philosophy of technology that informs the discussions in the rest of the book.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11016-024-01011-6