Logo
ScienceStack
Table of Contents
Fetching ...
Sign In

And Then the Hammer Broke: Reflections on Machine Ethics from Feminist Philosophy of Science

Andre Ye

TL;DR

The paper interrogates the ethics of machine vision by reframing it as a materially situated practice rather than a purely epistemic instrument. It draws on Haraway's concept of the god trick and Murdoch's moral vision to argue that contemporary vision systems are not gods but material hammers whose outputs shape human perception and labor. The author surveys the evolution from hand-designed perception to data-driven cognition, highlighting scale, diversity, and quality as essential design goals that better map the world yet also intensify ethical stakes. The main contribution is a nuanced, situated account that treats machine vision as a site of moral labor, capable of both distortion and illumination, thereby guiding responsible reflection and design in vision technologies.

Abstract

Vision is an important metaphor in ethical and political questions of knowledge. The feminist philosopher Donna Haraway points out the ``perverse'' nature of an intrusive, alienating, all-seeing vision (to which we might cry out ``stop looking at me!''), but also encourages us to embrace the embodied nature of sight and its promises for genuinely situated knowledge. Current technologies of machine vision -- surveillance cameras, drones (for war or recreation), iPhone cameras -- are usually construed as instances of the former rather than the latter, and for good reasons. However, although in no way attempting to diminish the real suffering these technologies have brought about in the world, I make the case for understanding technologies of computer vision as material instances of embodied seeing and situated knowing. Furthermore, borrowing from Iris Murdoch's concept of moral vision, I suggest that these technologies direct our labor towards self-reflection in ethically significant ways. My approach draws upon paradigms in computer vision research, phenomenology, and feminist epistemology. Ultimately, this essay is an argument for directing more philosophical attention from merely criticizing technologies of vision as ethically deficient towards embracing them as complex, methodologically and epistemologically important objects.

And Then the Hammer Broke: Reflections on Machine Ethics from Feminist Philosophy of Science

TL;DR

The paper interrogates the ethics of machine vision by reframing it as a materially situated practice rather than a purely epistemic instrument. It draws on Haraway's concept of the god trick and Murdoch's moral vision to argue that contemporary vision systems are not gods but material hammers whose outputs shape human perception and labor. The author surveys the evolution from hand-designed perception to data-driven cognition, highlighting scale, diversity, and quality as essential design goals that better map the world yet also intensify ethical stakes. The main contribution is a nuanced, situated account that treats machine vision as a site of moral labor, capable of both distortion and illumination, thereby guiding responsible reflection and design in vision technologies.

Abstract

Vision is an important metaphor in ethical and political questions of knowledge. The feminist philosopher Donna Haraway points out the ``perverse'' nature of an intrusive, alienating, all-seeing vision (to which we might cry out ``stop looking at me!''), but also encourages us to embrace the embodied nature of sight and its promises for genuinely situated knowledge. Current technologies of machine vision -- surveillance cameras, drones (for war or recreation), iPhone cameras -- are usually construed as instances of the former rather than the latter, and for good reasons. However, although in no way attempting to diminish the real suffering these technologies have brought about in the world, I make the case for understanding technologies of computer vision as material instances of embodied seeing and situated knowing. Furthermore, borrowing from Iris Murdoch's concept of moral vision, I suggest that these technologies direct our labor towards self-reflection in ethically significant ways. My approach draws upon paradigms in computer vision research, phenomenology, and feminist epistemology. Ultimately, this essay is an argument for directing more philosophical attention from merely criticizing technologies of vision as ethically deficient towards embracing them as complex, methodologically and epistemologically important objects.
Paper Structure (3 sections, 1 figure)

This paper contains 3 sections, 1 figure.

Table of Contents

  1. The Hammer
  2. "God is dead, and it has killed itself"
  3. Machine vision, moral vision

Figures (1)

  • Figure 1: a) Vision in general: objects are mapped to perceived features, which are cognized as knowledge. b) Vision for Haraway’s machine vision: the machine perceives the object and generates perceived features, which we cognize into (false) knowledge. c) Vision for our contemporary machine vision: the machine both perceives and cognizes the object, and we take the resulting knowledge and use it for some other purpose.