Designing for Whom? Against the One-World Ethics of Technology

Guest author: Jean-Miguel Hamm

Philosophy traditionally begins with two questions: What can we know? and What should we do? Epistemology and ethics—knowledge and action—form the foundation of the discipline, with centuries of thinkers debating whether these questions stand apart, inform one another, or co-constitute each other and reality itself.

Design, on the other hand, begins somewhere else: not in abstraction, but in transformation. Design is often described as the move from what is to what is desired as an act of world-making. But this seemingly pragmatic, creative process is never innocent. Because what is desired—like what is known or what is good—is never universal. It is always situated. It is always political. And so, when philosophy and design meet, we enter contested terrain: not simply how we think or make, but whose world we are making, imagining, legitimating, and enacting.

The Myth of the Universal Human

Mainstream design and tech ethics are saturated with appeals to "the human": human-centred design, human touch, human rights, humane AI, and responsible innovation “for humanity.” But who is this human? Who defines their needs, desires, and futures?

Re-reading Frantz Fanon Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor, Messay Kebede denounces sharply: ‘The erection of an idiosyncratic character into a universal norm is nothing but an aberrant usurpation’.

Sylvia Wynter has shown that the figure at the centre of Western ethics—what she calls “Man”—is not the human in general, but a particular historical invention: rational, white, male, propertied, secular. This figure came to stand in for all of humanity, producing an overrepresentation that functions by excluding other ways of being human. Technology design—when it calls upon “users” or “stakeholders” as if they were neutral, universal categories—extends this logic. The “user” is rarely disabled, Indigenous, gender nonconforming, or non-Western. The “stakeholder” is often imagined as a rational actor in a market, not someone whose worldview resists the market altogether.

This is not a technical flaw—it is a political tour de force.

Ethics as Empire

The ethical and empirical turn in the philosophy of technology was meant to ground abstract reflection in real-life practices. But it risks reproducing the same problem: assuming shared values, shared rationality, and shared ends. From ethical checklists to stakeholder consultations, we witness the spread of what Arturo Escobar calls the one-world world: a totalizing ontology that treats modern Western categories as the norm, and relegates everything else to local colour, cultural deviation, or “context.”

Even design methods meant to include—like “participatory design” or “value-sensitive design”—often function by asking marginalized communities to articulate their worlds in terms intelligible to the dominant one. The pluriverse is reduced to a “diverse user base.” The ontological difference is collapsed into demographic variation.

But the difference is not just cultural. It is ontological. As Escobar and Yuk Hui argue, technologies are embedded in cosmologies. Design is not only functional—it encodes answers to metaphysical questions: What is a human? What is time? What is nature? If we treat design as if these questions were already settled, we are not designing responsibly—we are reproducing empire.

Fanon, Parisi, and Colonial Ethics

Frantz Fanon warned that colonialism does not just occupy land; it occupies the psyche, reorganizing desire, knowledge, and value to fit the terms of the colonizer. Today, this colonization is carried forward in code, platform, and infrastructure. As Luciana Parisi has shown, algorithmic systems don’t just automate decisions—they reorganize the conditions of sense itself. They enforce new rationalities—statistical, recursive, extractive—that extend the legacy of what Wynter calls the “coloniality of being.”

Designing “ethical AI” without interrogating these deep layers is like repainting a battleship and calling it humanitarian aid. Cruz (2021) highlights how the top-down current design methodologies still reflect colonial ontologies.

What Ethics Demands

The question is not how to do better ethics of technology. The question is whether ethics, as currently practised, is structurally able to address the asymmetries it claims to mitigate. An ethics that assumes consensus, that operates on the fiction of neutrality, that speaks in the name of humanity while ignoring ontological plurality, is not ethics at all. It is governance. It is discipline. It is the moral arm of infrastructural capture.

We do not need better frameworks. We need to break the frame open.

Toward Ontological Insurrection

What would a pluriversal ethics of technology look like? It would start by refusing the totalizing tendencies of liberal universality. It would reject the idea that there is one shared reality into which all values must be translated. It would affirm, with Wynter, that “being human” is itself a question—and that the task is not to fix its meaning but to open it.

Drawing on Chantal Mouffe, Carl DiSalvo in ‘Design, Democracy and Agonistic Pluralism’ proposes a definition of political design as follows:

‘Simply stated, the purpose of political design is to do the work of agonism. This means first and foremost it does the work of creating spaces for revealing and confronting power relations, i.e., it creates spaces of contest.’

‘Ethical’ Design, in this view, cannot be the application of ethics with this in between of Being (what is) and Becoming (what is desired)—but more a battleground over Beings and Becomings. To design ethically is not to enforce the ‘right’ principles. It is to choose a side: between the world as it is and the worlds that could be.

This means embracing ontological friction, not smoothing it over. It means refusing to translate neatly. It means refusing to reduce rivers to resources, elders to data, community to feedback, or justice to impact. It means supporting communities in designing from their worlds, not just within ours.

It also means understanding that design is not always additive. Sometimes the most ethical act is to subtract: to not build, to not scale, to refuse the premise.

Final Provocations

If ethics in design is to be more than a managerial exercise, we must let go of the fantasy of neutral norms. We must accept that conflict, plurality, and incommensurability are not obstacles to ethical pluriversal design—they are its raw material.

Ethics, if it is to matter at all, must be ontologically rebellious.

Not a contract, but a rupture. Not a map, but a crack.

Not a checklist, but a refusal to let the future be decided by those who built the present.

References:

Cruz, C. C. (2021). Decolonizing philosophy of technology: Learning from bottom-up and top-down approaches to decolonial technical design. Philosophy & Technology, 34, 1847– 1881. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-021-00489-w
Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the pluriverse: Radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds. Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822371816
Escobar, A. (2020, April 29). What is pluriversal politics? An interview with Arturo Escobar on ontological design[Interview by A. Lesutis]. Uneven Earth. https://unevenearth.org/2020/04/what-is-pluriversal-politics-an-interview-with-arturoescobar/
Escobar, A., Tornel, C., & Lunden, A. (2022). On design, development and the axes of pluriversal politics: An interview with Arturo Escobar. Nordia Geographical Publications, 51(2), 103–122. https://doi.org/10.30671/nordia.115526
Fanon, F. (1961). The wretched of the Earth (C. Farrington, Trans.). Grove Press. (Original work published 1961 in French as Les damnés de la terre.)
Hui, Y. (2016). The question concerning technology in China: An essay in cosmotechnics. Urbanomic / Sequence Press. https://www.urbanomic.com/book/question-concerningtechnology-china/
Hui, Y. (2021). Art and cosmotechnics. University of Minnesota Press. https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/art-and-cosmotechnics
Kebede, M. (2001). The Rehabilitation of Violence and the violence of Rehabilitation: Fanon and Colonialism. Journal of Black Studies, 31(5), 539–562. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2668075
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