Technological ambiguity and the uneasy conscience: bringing Reinhold Niebuhr’s theology into dialogue with the philosophy of Lewis Mumford and Herbert Marcuse towards a Christian conception of responsibility in the technical age

Contemporary discussions regarding ethics in the technological society are obscured by faulty presuppositions regarding the answer to one question: is technology neutral or non-neutral? The question itself presents a binary that betrays a dimension of human nature that allows for the possibility of responsibility within the technological society to exist. We may presume human transcendence over, or contingence to, technology. In so doing, we either assuage one’s conscience of any moral deliberation whatsoever, or inhibit one’s freedom to the point of a mindless determinism. In either occasion, one is left with an easy conscience—an inability to attribute evil in the technological society to human conduct.
There are at least two thinkers, Lewis Mumford and Herbert Marcuse, who frame their understanding of the question of technological neutrality in a way that diminishes the pitfalls of either position. While Mumford holds that technology is neutral, he is still attentively critical of the philosophical presumptions that led to the rise of the technological society. While Marcuse holds that technology is non-neutral, his critique of the technological society does not default to a despairing determinism.
However, despite their contributions, both still presume anthropologies that lead them toward the same binary that both originally resisted, articulating the human as so transcendent over (Mumford) or contingent to (Marcuse) technology that one lacks the tensions necessary to establish an uneasy conscience—the recognition that humans are responsible for evil in the world.
In response, this thesis will utilize Reinhold Niebuhr’s method of Christian Realism as a way of establishing an anthropology upon which responsibility can be maintained, but also as a way of housing both Mumford and Marcuse’s critiques of the technological society within an alternative approach that transcends the neutrality/non-neutrality binary: namely, technological ambiguity.