29 August

Hotel keys were an example I was once given of how morality and technology are inseparable. Many hotels for years would attach large key rings to their keys. The reason for this was to try to stop people accidentally taking their keys with them when they checked out of a hotel - the inconvenience of carrying the large key around was supposed to prompt people to remember to give it back. Here a moral action - returning what isn’t yours - is embodied in a material object. No amount of asking people nicely to return the keys worked, no matter how moral and nice the people were. If you look around you, thousands of moral actions are embodied in material things in this way, our societies wouldn’t last a day without the material embodiment of moral actions.