Modern Technology, Preventive Ethics, and the Human Condition:

NEW MACHINES AND CHANGE OF CONCEPTS

New inventions and new machines are actively contributed to the change of our philosophical concepts, for example the ventilator as mentioned earlier, helped to continue pumping air to the lungs and keep a person who is in a coma state breathing regardless of losing consciousness, so the machine assisted in prolonging life and this process delayed death, thus our traditional concept of death changed to a new one which is called “brain death”; with the assumption of not avoiding death but at last delaying it. The concept of brain death itself is vague and not agreed upon; the criterion of measuring it varies from an operational one to a mere reflective, we can mention the irreversibility criterion, the cognitive, and Harvard criterion as an example.

The list of how machines changed our concepts is long and you can just reflect on some such as the refrigerator and the concept of ‘freshness’, the cell phone and the concept of “communication”, the internet and “virtual reality”etc, this is an interesting topic but it is much wider than my prefatory remarks in this paper where the focus is philosophical reflection on ethics and technology.