Empathy, shame and scruple and technological mediation

What is it about?

This article discusses the way technological objects shape bodily affects - especially the feeling of empathy and scruple. To do so, it introduces the work of Günther Anders and Jacques Derrida, which is attentive to the fact, that these affects and emotions are shaped by technology. As modernity unfolds, the working of empathy and the very nature of human agency are radically transformed - it is this transformation that both Anders and Derrida seek to think by turning to the image of the 'desert'. By introducing a 'desert ethics' and ethics not preoccupied with the articulation of values, but rather attitudes toward our own feelings, both thinkers begin to gesture toward an ethical framework fit for the complex realities technological progress creates.

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Why is it important?

It traces a growing discrepancy between embodied feelings that shape our behaviour as moral agents, such as empathy, scruple and shame, and the increasingly complex technological infrastructures that mediate our acts. As this infrastructure generates a level of abstraction that these feelings cannot bridge, our feelings as consumers and machine users fail to leave an emotional mark that could shape our behaviour as moral agents. This has fundamental consequences on our understanding of ethics, justice and politics that need to be thought. It also offers new ways to engage with global challenges that are a product of the cumulative effect of seemingly inconsequential individual actions of consumers and machine users.

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