The Morality of Scientific Technology

It is becoming common among philosophers to treat the progress of science and the proliferating system of technology as the now determining cause of history, autonomous and underlying like the Marxist “relations of production,” but narrower than that, less dependent on human choice. Whatever men wish, the independent development of scientific technology will shape the future. In more drastic versions of the theory, technology has already changed man into a product of itself or a technical function in its own system.

To Jacques Ellul, for instance, the American “empty society” can be more simply defined as an inevitable result of our high technology where, in his words, “work implies an absence of man,...