TITLE:
Can Technological Artifacts Become Moral Agents? —A Reconstructive Inquiry Based on Verbeek’s Theory of Technological Mediation
AUTHORS:
Fang Wang
KEYWORDS:
Technological Mediation, Intentionality, Freedom, Moral Agency, Postphenomenology
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.14 No.5,
May
12,
2026
ABSTRACT: Traditional approaches in the ethics of technology, grounded in a humanist subject-object dichotomy, typically regard technology as a morally neutral, instrumental entity. In contrast, Peter-Paul Verbeek, drawing on the theory of technological mediation, offers a relational reconstruction of the concepts of intentionality and freedom. Intentionality is no longer understood as an exclusive property of human consciousness, but as a relationally distributed structure of directedness emerging within the human-technology-world nexus. Likewise, freedom is not conceived as a transcendental capacity to escape all external influences, but as a reflective and creative practice enacted within technologically mediated contexts. Accordingly, the moral subject can no longer be treated as a pre-given starting point of ethical analysis; rather, it is constituted within a network of mutual mediation between humans and technological artifacts.