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Eliana Herrera-Vega’s Paper Proposal

Consequences of complex socio-technical systems for the level of human agency

Technological advancement has dramatically changed the praxis. Nowadays human agents share the phenomenological ground with a variety of social systems, gadgets, cyborgs and human extensions, which modify the conditions of freedom and ethical responsibility. Classical ethical approaches are besieged by the material development of society, as the place of subjectivity is no longer restricted to the human individual. This paper addresses the following: What is the remaining space for humans within a technologically made society? How should theory proceed in the objective of properly retracing technological advancements that have been left unobserved? How is it possible to address current problems caused by the encounter of ecological boundaries with both human action and expert social systems? The description of a society without men, as N. Luhmann posits, can be useful to preserve the human space, in the midst of a radically different notion of alterity.

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