Ethics, values and morality: Introduction

Technologies generate questions. Questions about how to live with them, make them, understand their implications, share their benefits, and limit their harms. Sometimes the questions are specific: what does a new way of doing something mean for those who re-shape their lives around it? At other times, the questions are broader: should this technology exist at all? This section brings together the substantial contributions that anthropologists have made to discussing and analysing the disquiet and awe of technological advance, and the languages-ethics, values, and morality-through which it has been addressed. In this Introduction, we review the anthropology of technology as seen through the lenses of ethics, morality, and values, covering both historical attention to these areas of concern and contemporary work. We then introduce the chapters of this section, situating the seven ethnographies in these broader literatures and narrating their shared concerns. From the embodiment of values in material form to their contestation through conversation, policy, and practice, we make visible the registries of contemporary contestations over technology, and the means by which people struggle to settle normative questions about the form that human futures should take.