فهرست نشریات علمی دسترسی آزاد ایران

The moral status of technology is a foundational issue in the philosophy and ethics of technology that has long been contested. The central question in this field is whether technologies inherently embody values—especially moral values—or whether they function as neutral instruments. Two opposing camps address this question: proponents of Value-Ladenness of Technology contend that technologies are intrinsically imbued with values independent of their users, and that these values manifest in design, deployment, and socio-ethical impacts; by contrast, proponents of Value-Neutral Technology maintain that technologies themselves are neutral and devoid of intrinsic value, and that only human uses confer morally good or bad values upon them. They argue that technology should only be subject to moral evaluation within the context of human application. In this paper, we examine and evaluate the ongoing debate through two key articles in the field: David Morrow’s “The Values Built into Technologies,” which defends the VLT position, and Joseph C. Pitt’s “Value-Free Technology?”, which advances the VNT perspective. The aim of this study is to compare, analyze, and assess the arguments of these two approaches and to gauge their strength and validity. Ultimately, our evaluations indicate that Pitt’s arguments—particularly in terms of logical coherence, philosophical depth, conceptual precision, practical applicability to ethical issues in technology, and emphasis on moral responsibility—are preferable to those of Morrow.