ABOUT BOOK

The work of Wittgenstein has so far received little attention from scholars working in the philosophy of technology. In this chapter, I relate my Wittgenstein-inspired account of moral certainty, which ~conceives of moral certainty as the certainty of morally competent agents, to recent work on socially disruptive technologies and the phenomenon of technosocial disruption. In a complex interplay ~with other factors, technologies such as artificially intelligent systems and robots challenge norms, practices, and concepts that play a fundamental role in human life. I argue that technosocial ~disruption involves the disruption of moral certainty, and that we should refine our notion of moral certainty by integrating the idea of technological mediation. In our technological world, technology ~mediates how something acquires the role of a moral certainty or loses it, and how moral certainty is manifested in different contexts. I discuss two examples of contexts in which technological ~developments challenge moral agency at the level of moral certainty: the introduction of robots in elderly care practices and the potential use of ectogestative technology for foetal development.