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The Goodness and Kindhood of Artefacts

2012; Springer Nature (Netherlands); Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/978-94-007-5243-6_10

1879-7210

Maarten Franssen,

Aesthetic Perception and Analysis

One of the peculiar features of our discourse with respect to technical artefacts is its richly evaluative and normative character. We speak routinely of good alarm clocks and poor corkscrews and of functioning mobile phones and malfunctioning TV sets. Elsewhere, I have argued that the normative character of this discourse is linked to the fact that artefacts figure in a context of human action, more in particular a context of use (Franssen 2006, 2009a). Technical artefacts owe their existence to the goal directness of much of human life; they have been designed to be used, in order for their users to achieve certain goals or achieve certain purposes. Given that we have certain goals or purposes, the qualities of artefacts give us reasons to use them or not to use them in order to achieve these goals and purposes. It is because the qualities of artefacts are reason-giving that evaluative statements are normative; they express to what extent the specific qualities of a particular artefact give someone a reason to use it, given this person’s reasonable goals. Of course, artefacts are not the only things whose properties can give us reasons to use them or reasons to act in a particular way with respect to them (treat them with care, avoid them, and what have you). We can use a nutcracker to crack open a nut or we can use a rock that happens to be at hand. We may consider both to be good for the job of cracking this nut. However, this fact makes the nutcracker a good nutcracker but not the rock a good rock. The nutcracker is good qua nutcracker: it was designed for being used to crack nuts. The goodness of the rock in this context is not its goodness qua rock, but neither is it its goodness qua nutcracker, since the rock is not a nutcracker. At most we can say that the rock is a good rock for cracking nuts with. Using it for cracking nuts does not ipso facto make the rock into a nutcracker.