ABSTRACT
The comprehensible desire to emulate the achievements, the usefulness and the prestige of the natural sciences and technology has led many social scientists to envisage an applied science of social technology - also called social engineering and lately sociotechnics-which would solve mankind’s difficulties just as physical technology is believed to have solved the problems of production and scarcity. Mankind’s selfishness wrongly excludes our dealings with animals from the field of ethics, and approves of their treatment from a purely technical viewpoint. In human affairs we get the nearest approach to technicity in a situation where the rulers treat their subjects as creatures devoid of rights. From a strictly technical standpoint the Nazi gas-chambers have constituted a clear step forward in comparison with the methods used by the Hideyoshi to exterminate the Christians in Japan, because they achieved considerably higher productivity.
