Maximilian Weber’s idea of value neutrality in academia has had a profound impact on the fields of education and technology. Educators should teach a variety of values, and the debate about limiting technological development is still ongoing. The side effects and ethical responsibilities of big technology should also be discussed.
The value neutrality of academia was advocated by Maximilian Carl Emil Weber. He introduced the concept of value neutrality in the early 1900s when he criticized biased education in universities. The idea is that educators have an obligation to be value-neutral and teach a variety of values, not just one, and that the final value judgment should be left to the student to form a sound mind. Weber’s argument made waves in his time and remains an important concept in the field of education today.
Weber’s value-neutrality can be seen as follows, if we liken learning to climbing a mountain. The educator (A) is the pioneer of the mountain, and the student (B) is the laggard. The reality of Germany at the time was that A’s subjective judgment determined the path up the mountain. B gives up diversity to climb the mountain. The lack of diversity leads to a limited ability to cope with dead ends and problems. Weber’s solution is for B to make a choice. B’s autonomous choice is to be diverse, and this flexibility can lead to better paths.
Value neutrality has had an impact in many fields, not just academia. In the case of technology, the thesis was presented during the development of technology. When a restrictionist theory emerged to restrict the development of some technologies (U), an opponent argued for a non-restrictionist theory that would allow researchers to develop all technologies and let the users of the technology choose, just as in education. If the former corresponds to position A, then the latter corresponds to position B. This debate can be seen as an attempt to find a balance between technological advancement and ethical responsibility.
Non-restrictivism points out the fallibility of subjective judgment. Technology is a means of applying scientific theories to practice, manipulating objects in nature to make them useful for human life. Usefulness can be left to the researcher’s judgment or to the user’s choice, since the researcher’s judgment is subject to error.
Consider the development of random access memory (RAM). RAM is the human equivalent of the hippocampus. When a program runs, it is stored in RAM and deleted from RAM when it exits. At the beginning of RAM development, Microsoft’s Bill Gates predicted that 640 kilobytes of RAM would be enough. KB stands for kilo byte, where byte is a unit of information storage and kilo represents 2^10. However, as complex programs are developed, large amounts of memory are required, and nowadays, units of tera (2^40) are developed and used instead of kilo. If the development process had been limited to 640 KB, most computers today would be stuck in the 90s. This example can be used to justify the non-limit theory with the infinite possibilities of technological advancement.
In response, limiters point out that modern technology is a giant that operates on a large scale. When something goes wrong, the damage is so large and difficult to repair that it can’t be left to the whim of the user without a plan in place. Einstein’s atomic bomb is a great example of this. The atomic bomb is the technology that won World War II for the Allies. Einstein was the scientist who recommended its development, and he decided that the world peace that would result from the Allied victory was more important than developing a weapon of mass destruction. Although victory was eventually achieved, it resulted in hundreds of thousands of casualties, whose descendants still suffer from genetic mutations. Using this as a mirror, later UN member states began signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to limit nuclear development.
The problem is that Einstein was not responsible as a technologist. There have been cases where technologists have been held liable for problems caused by their technology, but it’s questionable whether they’ve been compensated substantially. Such is the case with thalidomide. Thalidomide, a drug made by the German company Grünenthal, was a popular morning sickness remedy in Europe. However, many pregnant women who took it gave birth to deformed babies, many with missing arms and legs. As a follow-up, Grunenthal paid out 1 billion marks in compensation, which at the time was only 70 million dollars per deformed child at the exchange rate. This case illustrates how the misuse of technology can have a huge social cost.
Non-restrictionists argue that despite these negative effects, technology is still value-neutral by definition. Technology is an application of science, and science remains universal because it is a universal truth. On the other hand, there is something wrong with people who misuse value-neutral technology.
However, this does not apply to mega-technologies such as the atomic bomb and medicine. The universality of scientific truths cannot be maintained simply because the side effects of these technologies affect the general society. The impact is too great to be blamed on the users of the technology alone.
So should value neutrality be restricted to big technologies only? I think it can be applied to the research system to ensure proper research ethics. As the scale of technology grows, the funding to support it becomes important, and research revolves around two pillars: the people who actually do the research and the sponsors who pay for it. Sponsors have limited funds, so they have to make choices based on profit, and researchers have to perform consistently to get funding, which creates psychological pressure.
In South Korea, the Hwang Woo-Seok falsification case is famous. The media hyped stem cells as a technology that would catapult South Korea into a technological superpower, and research funding became more intensive. The pressure to perform soon led to illegal trafficking of eggs for embryonic stem cell research and embezzlement of government funds. The 2015 Nobel Prize for neutrinos, which was announced in 2015, was awarded to a researcher who had been working on neutrinos since the 1950s and didn’t show results until the 2000s, which is a sad contrast to Korea’s research environment. The ‘Act on Performance Evaluation and Performance Management of National Research and Development Projects’, a law under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning, states in Article 3, Paragraph 1 that the evaluation of research and development activities shall be based on performance. While we often hear about the development of world-first technologies, the lack of influential research that wins Nobel Prizes suggests that the system needs to be improved.
The value-neutrality of technology is a recent thesis. Since Weber’s advocacy of value neutrality in pedagogy, it has influenced various fields, pitting the restrictionist view that technology can be restricted at any stage of its development against the non-restrictionist view that it cannot be restricted by value neutrality. Non-restrictionists supported value neutrality because of the benefits of technology and the universality of science by definition, but restrictionists pointed out that the universality of science cannot be maintained with mega-technologies, and that the side effects of technology are widespread and cannot be left to user choice without countermeasures.
The recent Volkswagen scandal is an example of the limits being placed on megatechnologies. Fossil-fueled cars are blamed for global warming and are already restricted by environmental laws. As for untapped technologies, stem cells, CRISPR, and artificial intelligence are debated as to whether they are value-neutral. The desire to solve inconveniences drives new technologies, but no one knows what boomerangs they will return as. It could be a computer on your desk, but it could also be an atomic bomb. Maybe it’s time to start thinking about how to live with moderate discomfort.
