Socially Disruptive Technologies and Moral Certainty

Technology and pronouns: disrupting the ‘Natural Attitude about Gender’

“…The paradigm case of conceptual disruption in the philosophy of technology seems to be that of technologically induced conceptual disruption (Hopster et al, 2023;Löhr, 2023), often in conjunction with social disruption. To give two examples: the development of artificial wombs may challenge the concept of 'motherhood' (Frank et al, 2023;Hermann, 2023), and the development of sex robots with human-like cognitive capacities may challenge the concepts of 'sexual fidelity' and 'adultery' (Löhr, 2023). In either case, the new technology leaves us with normative uncertainty about how to apply terms whose meaning seemed unambiguous before.…”