ABSTRACT
Responsibility is traditionally understood in terms of values, primarily as a duty, stimulated and conditioned ethically, morally, or through other sources of human values, of the subjects of rational and thus goal-directed action aimed at selecting humanly acceptable objectives and means of their action, while paying heed to its results, including potential future impacts. An important place in the broadly based realm of goal-directed actions is occupied by those types of actions in which human creations are made and, hence, different areas of artifacts, including technical artifacts which substantially change the content and means of human self-fulfi llment, while improving and enriching this content and its range, and, at the same time, posing new dangers and new risks. It was the Polish philosopher T. Kotarbiński, who, as one of the leading fi gures of a world philosophical congress to be held in Vienna in 1968 called on the author of this study to prepare an invited paper on the key issue of the philosophy of technology. (The paper was published in German under the title “Januskopf der Technik,” that is, the dual face of technology, and anticipated a novel theme in contemporary technical thinking, most frequently described as “technology assessment.”) This particular mode
of thinking and reasoning, that is, an ability to perceive and respect not only the positive aspects, benefi ts, and advantages of newly created as well as applied artifacts but also potential accompanying negative impacts or risks, calls for the necessity of integrating knowledge of different nature and different provenances but also for the need to integrate knowledge and values. Also seen in this sense, the legacy and traditions of Kotarbiński´s well-known treatise on effi cient action should be taken as a major challenge posed also to the civilization’s new trends and programs, such as images of the information society, knowledge society, or society capable of technologically implementing or supplementing even very challenging and sophisticated human action.
