In his brief but insightful book, Nature and Altering It, ethicist Allen Verhey discusses a series of myths that underlie our understanding of nature (at the outset of the book he cataloged 16 uses of the idea of “nature”). While discussing one of these myths, the myth of the project of liberal society, Verhey writes,

“Finally, however, the folly of the myth of liberal society is displayed in the pretense that ‘maximizing freedom’ is always morally innocent. ‘Maximizing freedom,’ however, can ironically increase our bondage. What is introduced as a way to increase our options can become socially enforced. The point can easily be illustrated with technology. New technologies are frequently introduced as ways to increase our options, as ways to maximize our freedom, but they can become socially enforced. The automobile was introduced as an option, as an alternative to the horse, but it is now socially enforced …. The technology that surrounds our dying was introduced to give doctors and patients options in the face of disease and death, but such ‘options’ have become socially enforced; at least one sometimes still hears, “We have no choice!” And the technology that may come to surround birth, including pre-natal diagnosis, for example, may come to be socially enforced. ‘What? You knew you were at risk for bearing a child with XYZ, and you did nothing about it? And now you expect help with this child?’ Now it is possible, of course, to claim that cars and CPR and pre-natal diagnosis are the path of progress, but then the argument has shifted from the celebration of options and the maximizing of freedom to something else, to the meaning of progress.”

It should not be hard to multiply examples.

It is worth noting, as well, that it is in his discussion of the myth associated with the project of liberal society that Verhey draws on examples from the realm of technology. The two phenomena are deeply intertwined as I’ve suggested a time or two.