Technoprogressivism

technoprogressivism, technoprogressivism, tech-progressivism or techprogressivism is a stance of active support for both technological and democratic social progress. Technoprogressives argue that technological developments can be profoundly empowering and emancipatory when they are regulated by democratic and accountable authorities to ensure that their costs, risks and benefits are fairly shared.

Technoprogressivism

Technoprogressives are heirs of the Enlightenment project of promoting human freedom and happiness though both scientific and technological progress, and democratic and liberal social change. For most technoprogressives science and technology do not achieve ideal progress unless accompanied by a just distribution of the costs, risks, and benefits of these new knowledges and capacities. At the same time, for most technoprogressive critics and advocates, the achievement of better democracy, greater fairness, less violence, and a wider rights culture are all desirable, but inadequate in themselves to confront the quandaries of contemporary technological societies unless and until they are accompanied by progress in science and technology to support and implement these values.

Technoprogressives support the civil rights of persons (human or non-human) to either maintain or modify his or her own mind and body, on his or her own terms, through informed, consensual recourse to, or refusal of, available therapeutic or enabling biomedical technology.

Bioconservatism

Bioconservatives believe that emerging technologies, such as genetic engineering and nanotechnology, should be restricted because of the threats they pose to "human dignity" or social equality. Bioconservative positions include opposition to genetic modification or cloning of food crops, farm and companion animals, and rejection of the genetic, prosthetic, and cognitive modification of human beings to overcome what are broadly perceived as current human biological and cultural limitations.

Bioconservatives range in political perspective from right-leaning religious and cultural conservatives to left-leaning environmentalists and technology critics. What unifies bioconservatives is skepticism about medical and other biotechnological transformations of the living world. Typically less sweeping as a critique of technological society than bioluddism, the bioconservative perspective is characterized by its defense of the natural, deployed as a moral category.

Although technoprogressivism is the stance which contrasts with bioconservatism in the biopolitical spectrum, both technoprogressivisms and bioconservatisms, in their more moderate expressions, share an opposition to unsafe, unfair, undemocratic forms of technological development, and both recognize that such developmental modes can facilitate unacceptable recklessness and exploitation, exacerbate injustice and incubate dangerous social discontent.

Technoprogressive Issues on Wikipedia

Defining Technoprogressive Essays

Technoprogressive Links

• Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies
• Overview of Biopolitics
• Technoprogressive Yahoo Group
• Test Your Techno Tolerance