The Master/iSlave Dialectic: Post (Hegelian) Phenomenology and the Ethics of Technology

In part one of this paper I turn to Don Ihde to show how a technological object can occupy the role that “the other” plays for Hegel in his phenomenology as the structural features of Hegel's analyses of self-other relations can be found in Ihde's analyses of human-technology relations. I then turn to Singer's Wired for War and Gertz's Philosophy of War and Exile. Using these texts I show how the way soldiers treat robots by naming them, protecting them, and by even risking their lives to save them, illustrates Hegel's central claim: ethical life develops based on the process of discovering that to recognize others (whether human or technological) is to recognize ourselves and that to misrecognize others is to misrecognize ourselves. I conclude by offering suggestions as to how this understanding of ethical life as based on recognition and misrecognition can be applied to design ethics.