Materializing morality – Design ethics and technological mediation

During the past decade, the “script ” concept, indicating how technologies prescribe human actions, has acquired a central place in STS. Until now, the concept has mainly functioned in descriptive settings. This article will deploy it in a normative setting. When technologies coshape human actions, they give material answers to the ethical question of how to act. This implies that engi-neers are doing “ethics by other means”: they materialize morality. The article will explore the implications of this insight for engineering ethics. It first augments the script concept by developing the notion of technological medi-ation. After this, it investigates how the concept of mediation could be made fruitful for design ethics. It discusses how the ambition to design behavior-influencing technologies raises moral questions itself and elaborates two methods for anticipating technological mediation in the design process: per-forming mediation analyses and using an augmented version of constructive technology assessment