| article |
| Public Participation in the Technological Assessment and Whitehead’s Togetherness in Decision-Making |
| Sang-Ha Lee and Jongduck Choi, Public Participation in the Technological Assessment and Whitehead’s Togetherness in Decision-Making, The Journal of Whitehead Studies Nr.2(1999) , The Whitehead Society of Korea Technological assessment (TA) is a decision-making procedure to estimate the possible social and economic consequences that the application of a new technique will bring about. TA is firmly institutionalized in America and some parts of Europe, whereas public participation in TA is still to be realized at a practical level. One theoretical reason behind th lack of public participation may be found in the utilitarian tradition in the western culture. Consequentialist Model of TA (CQM) regards the viewpoints of the individual citizens as irrelevant th the public utility, because the means are justified only by their end-results. Discourse-Ethical Model of TA(DM) as a possible alternative to CQM, confined by its own network of theoretical notions, also appears to be inactive as to the public participation in TA. It is doubtful, whether a formal context-free discourse-reason can be presupposed in our ordinary communication. We come to consider Common-Sense-Model of TA(CSM). The combination of the notions of “acts allowed merely in the ordinary sense” and allowed morally in the ordinary sense” suggests a need of public participation in TA. But any decisions made by CSM cannot exactly determine the future because the organically intertwined, patterned structure of individuals and the satisfaction of individual desires never seem to agree. The Whiteheadian concept of “togetherness” explains the reasons underlying our life-world that take time evolving a structure in which intrinsic values are accompanied. Then, our ordinary and future-oriented judgments based on those values are a kind of “living occasions” in an organic structure, which is the life-world. There is no sorrow on the part of philosophers in the fact that our actual decision-making is not exactly quantitative in mathematical sense. The work presented here is at its schematic stage. Further progress and more detailed account will follow in the forthcoming phase of this work. |