The concept of social pathology has long belonged to the toolkit of social scientists, and several critical social philosophers have found it indispensable for linking social ontology to social criticism. While different conceptions of social pathology, as well as their applicability as diagnostic tools for social wrongs, have been debated, a common area of neglect becomes apparent when we consider pathological states of social wholes, such as societies, as not only socially but technically constituted. As a first step towards filling this gap, this paper introduces the concept of sociotechnical pathology. Drawing on existing work on social pathology, it discusses four different general conceptions of sociotechnical pathology as a diagnostic tool for analyzing socially and technically constituted social wrongs. The paper contributes to philosophical inquiry at the cross-section of critical social philosophy and philosophy of technology by paving way for substantive conceptions of sociotechnical pathology.
Comparisons between the health of organisms and that of societies, be it in the form of
poetic metaphors or scientific concepts, have long persisted in vocabularies for
analyzing social issues, for better or worse. The concept of social pathology – although
debated in many respects – has been seen as indispensable for the project of social
philosophy in that it seems particularly apt for analyzing phenomena, processes, and
practices such as reification, ideology, alienation, invisibilization, social inequality,
exploitation, domination, and oppression
Debates in social philosophy concern the proper conception of social pathology, and a specific issue pertains to the biological and medical connotations of the term (see
Copyright © 2021 for this paper by its authors.
Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) Honneth, 2014; Laitinen & Särkelä, 2019). In this paper, a common area of neglect across specific substantive conceptions is highlighted: the technical constitution of pathological conditions of social reality, which provides the backdrop for, and intertwines with, their social constitution. From databases and automated decision-making systems to networked digital infrastructures, technologies (increasingly) enable and mediate practices which can be understood as pathological in the sense described above. This highlights the need to consider the intertwining social and technical causes of pathological conditions qua social wrongs. To this end, this paper initiates a discussion on pathological conditions of social reality grounded in sociotechnical arrangements and argues for the concept of sociotechnical pathology. The general claim, that the concept of social pathology fails to account for the technological, is stated in Section 2, although it is supported throughout the paper. The paper proceeds to consider four ways of conceptualizing sociotechnical pathologies, drawing on work in critical social philosophy and other fields such as critical algorithm studies and AI ethics. Two normativist conceptions are discussed in Section 3, and two naturalist conceptions in Section 4. I will not defend a specific substantive conception of sociotechnical pathology, although for the sake of transparency I disclose that my sympathies lie with the fourth conception. The final section provides a summary of the paper. 2
The concept of social pathology is motivated by the seeming narrowness of moral and
political philosophy as lenses for analyzing what can be characterized as ‘social
wrongs’ – wrongful states, diseases, or disorders of social life, of social entities, or of
social reality as a whole
Notably, the biological and medical terminology of social pathology has raised
concern in discussions in the social sciences and social philosophy. Some take the term
‘pathology’ to naturalize social phenomena and to constitute a counterproductive way
of describing and criticizing social issues. Others find the notion of pathology as
indispensable for diagnosing social wrongs
The concept of social pathology is generally meant to aid in the analysis of social
wrongs as distinct from other wrongs, and thereby implies a deviation from common
use of the concept of ‘wrongness’ as interchangeable with ‘wrongness’ in the sense of
interpersonal violations of morality or as injustice. Indeed, it is here taken that injustice,
for example, is a wrong-making feature alongside others, including other political
wrongs, and (non-)interpersonal violations of moral principles1. Hence, actions and
states-of-affairs can be, in this account, understood as wrong in different senses – wrong
qua morally wrong, wrong qua unjust, and so on. This demarcates the area of inquiry
and critique understood as critical social philosophy, distinguishing it from political
and moral philosophy: whereas, say, political ethics is concerned with political rights
and wrongs, critical social philosophy concerns itself with social rights and wrongs
Given the general consensus regarding ethical and political issues related to technology, it seems clear that sociotechnical analysis is necessary for understanding the interrelated social and technical factors underlying many of the relevant wrongs. However, to motivate the concept of sociotechnical pathology, I need to argue that this is the case with social wrongs as well. 2.1
What motivates the concept of sociotechnical pathology as a diagnostic tool of specific
subset of wrongs? The reasoning here goes as follows: If social reality can suffer from
pathological conditions (i.e., if there can be social wrongs) and if technical objects are
at least minimally constitutive of social reality, then it seems social wrongs can be at
least minimally technically caused and/or constituted. In other words, if social
pathology refers to there being something wrong with the social fabric
This reasoning incorporates two core theses commonly maintained by sociotechnical
systems theorists: (1) both social and technical factors are constitutive of systems’
functioning and success, and that (2) interactions between these factors can involve
linear and non-linear causal relationships. This leaves open the possibility that
pathological conditions of social reality are undesigned and unexpected: social and
1 Roughly, interpersonal violations of moral principles occur when a person wrongs another,
while what I call non-interpersonal violations comprise wrongs against non-persons, such as
animals.
technical factors can malfunction, perhaps simultaneously, leading a sociotechnical
system (or “organism”) to a pathological state. Conversely, interventions on one or the
other, or both, can work to “cure” pathological states (or not). In this sense, with the
term ‘minimal constitution’ used above I simply refer to the myriad of ways
(networked) technical objects can causally contribute to the existence of pathological
conditions, directly and indirectly. For example, technical objects and material and
digital infrastructure can (and do) constitute the backdrop of social reality and activity.
In this sense, there is always a sociotechnical arrangement underlying social reality.
Technical objects – e.g., algorithmic decision-making systems – also increasingly
perform functions that actively maintain and transform social reality, for better or
worse. Hence, technology can be at least one cause in the causal chain leading to social
wrongs. For example, alienation, invisibilization, and ideologies such as colonialism
and capitalism, among other ills of the social typically diagnosed as pathologies
Technology is primarily understood here as a backdrop of social activity or as performing functions relevant to social reality and its state. There is, however, room in this view for stronger arguments to the end that technical objects would themselves be (quasi-)social (quasi-)agents in some relevant sense2, and thereby function as subjects of pathological experience capable of being wronged. This would effectively strengthen their ontological status as part of agential, social relations constitutive of what have been traditionally understood as social entities in (critical) social ontology. As my aim is to only pave way for detailed substantive conceptions of sociotechnical pathology, I commit here only to a minimal view where technical objects can function as (partial) metaphysical grounds of a social ontology.
Now, a social pathologist – even if convinced by the relevance of technological mediation for discussions of social pathology in some extra-theoretical sense, or with respect to moral and political considerations – might regard the sociotechnical framing as redundant or irrelevant to the diagnosis of pathologies. Indeed, could we not merely ascribe instrumental status to technology? To do so, I maintain, would be to neglect that the concept of the ‘sociotechnical’ is precisely meant to describe the interdependence, intertwined-ness, and reciprocal construction of practices and contexts irreducible to the social or the technical alone: social reality is (and has been) a sociotechnical reality in the strict sense.
This section has provided general motivation for the concept of sociotechnical
pathology. For present purposes, I shall hope the reader is convinced of the necessity
of sociotechnical analysis for understanding pathological conditions of social reality.
To pave way for substantive accounts in this respect, I will next sketch four different
conceptions of sociotechnical pathology following a four-fold classification for
conceptions of social pathology proposed in
Normativist conceptions of social and sociotechnical pathology ascribe the status ‘pathological’ to a subset of social wrongs. The first conception discussed here is antitheoretical as it maintains no common conceptual structure underlying social wrongs can be found; it only uses ‘pathology’ as a label for socially criticizable issues. Proponents of the second conception will disagree, holding that there is a unified structure to be found in sociotechnical pathologies. 3.1
According to the first (anti-theoretical and anti-naturalist) normativist view of social
pathology, normativist view of social pathology, the term 'social pathology' simply
refers to things that are in some sense social and wrong
As this first conception provides no theoretical account of social pathology, not much can be said about translating the concept into the language of sociotechnical systems aside the general comments in Section 2 concerning the sociotechnical constitutions and causes of social wrongs. Sociotechnical pathologies, according to this anti-theoretical account, do not share in features or structure amenable to analysis aside their wrongness, however. In this sense, sociotechnical analysis can only offer negative characterizations of social wrongs, and retrospectively inform their sociotechnical “etiology” once they are identified. For proponents of non-essentialist views of social wrongs, the conception can yet be of use, perhaps. 3.2
A second set of normativist conceptions of social pathology is unified by the thesis that
social pathologies share a structure amenable to theoretical analysis. This theoretical
structure can be analyzed in anti-naturalist terms, however, without the need for
naturalistic biological, or medical terminology some consider problematic
In Christopher Zurn’s view, pathologies, including “ideological recognition,
maldistribution, invisibilisation, rationality distortions, reification and institutionalised
self-realisation”, share a conceptual structure in that they “all operate by means of
second-order disorders”
Could the presently discussed normativist conceptions of social pathology provide a
theoretical basis for conceptualizing sociotechnical pathologies? To start, a diverse
literature on data- and algorithmically driven forms of capitalism and colonialism,
exploitation, oppression, and dispossession
Likewise, the self-perpetuating negative dynamic discussed by
I should here emphasize that the technological aspect of the discussed social wrongs is indispensable as an object of analysis in both cases, be it as second-order disorders – i.e., disconnections between sociotechnical reality and subjects’ comprehension of it – or ‘negative spiral’ dynamics. By acknowledging the fact that the technology is partly constitutive of the pathological disconnect or dynamic, and by incorporating the technical layer into our conception of pathology, we fill the gap that is unbridgeable within the framing of social pathology alone.
Now, there are certain problems with the conception of sociotechnical pathology qua
second-order disorder or dynamic. Regarding pathologies as second-order disorders,
Laitinen and Särkelä aptly note that “the fault need not lie in the disconnect between
reality and reflection, but in the social reality itself” (2019, 85). Indeed, both
invisibilization and brute force can be reflexively recognized by individuals
experiencing such wronging, for example, although the contrary may also be the case
in cases of “learnt self-invisibilization” (ibid.). Hence, this conception seems to neglect
pathological first-order wrongs where no disconnect occurs. This critique arguably
applies to the analogous conception of sociotechnical pathology: while social wrongs
in the first-order – e.g., algorithmic oppression
Regarding the dynamic conception of sociotechnical pathology, it would seem that
first-order wrongs as sociotechnical phenomena can exhibit structural features other
than unstoppable self-perpetuating dynamics. Conceptually speaking, structural
similarities can likely be found underlying cases where algorithmic systems reproduce
social inequality, but it is not clear that this applies to sociotechnically enabled or
induced alienation and invisibilization, for example. It is also possible that there are
diverse structures for wrongs under a single category, such as those mentioned
previously, which means that a normativist conception might benefit from a more
complex and nuanced account of pathological structures underlying sociotechnical
phenomena
Proponents of naturalist views use the concept of social pathology in a contentful
manner in order to identify what is wrong with social reality
The first conception embraces the naturalistic terminology of pathology: a social
pathology is an ‘illness’ in a social organism – specifically, a deviation from the
“reproductive values and ends of society”
How to accommodate sociotechnical diagnosis of pathology with the organistic view? One option is to understand technology as a ‘prosthetic’ part of the social whole4. Here, technologies are functional replacements of (or complements to) the organism’s functional subcomponents, its “organs”. Consider, say, Big Data datasets and automated decision-making systems as technical prosthetics of social organisms. Datasets could be understood from a Derridian technology-as-prosthesis viewpoint as augmenting a social organism’s memory in that they perform and complement the archiving processes necessary for the reproduction of the social whole. The implementation of automated decision-making systems in the public sector is often guided the vision that institutional functions are optimized, made more effective, consistent, and objective by “tapping into” this prosthetic memory. In this sense, datasets as technology not only function as archives and memories, but they enable the optimized reproduction of the self-maintaining social organism through interaction with other technologies-as-organs, such as automated optimization systems.
Now, within this view, a pathological condition can be understood as sociotechnical insofar as disruption of the social organism’s self-maintaining process is attributable to technical factors (in addition to social ones). The technical object as prosthetic can be, on the one hand, directly rejected by the social whole akin to how transplants or artificial limbs can irritate the body and be rejected by it. This would be the case when a specific technology or technological condition is reflexively taken as unfit to serve the ends of the social whole. For example, the use of carbon-intensive technology running on fossil fuels can be understood as pathological in this sense. There is a large consensus on addressing the climate crisis, and various ideological dynamics, such as capitalist and colonialist logics qua social patterns, contribute to (and reproduce) the present pathological condition of inaction. Importantly, however, from the sociotechnical point of view, technology itself is one causal reason of the organism’s disease by effectively and actively undermining conditions of its self-maintenance in a causal-functional sense.
The notion of the interrelatedness and reciprocal construction of the social and the
technical is essential here, as ideological narratives, for example, can distort
second-order reflexivity regarding pathological conditions. Under pathological
4 An alternative view is a relational one, where the ontological status of technical artefacts is less
neatly separable from questions of epistemology. Relational views have been di
As was stated above, morality and politics can also fail their reproductive functions
within the organistic view. Accordingly, it may be that ethical and political standards
for technology development and use need to be revised to safeguard the organism’s
technologically mediated self-maintaining process. Concrete examples abound, as
several calls have been made for approaches to ethical governance of technology better
suited to criticize existing power asymmetries in contemporary societies
Now, the organicist conception is vulnerable to certain criticisms which I do not
consider here5. However, one significant disadvantage of the organicist view I wish to
highlight here is “that the organism analogy squeezes society into such a static shape
that radical social critique becomes impossible”
A viable conception of sociotechnical pathology should retain the diagnostic power of the concept afforded by the naturalist frame without committing one to a view with no room for transformative social critique. The last conception discussed here promises to do just that. 4.2
Another naturalist conception of social pathology builds mutability into the very concept of social reality by understanding pathological states as things being wrong with social lifeprocesses. Laitinen and Särkelä, who attribute the ontological view underlying this conception to John Dewey, summarize its ontological commitments as follows: “Whereas organicism rests on the conception of the organism as an ideally organized self-maintaining substance […] the idea of a distinctively social life, by contrast, is committed to the idea of a lifeprocess operating above and beneath the living body and conceives life as irreducible to the organism” (2019, 94). Social life, according to this conception, can develop into a pathological state by losing its “transformative growth” and stagnating into “a merely organic process”, or by failing to reproduce its form, degenerating “into mere inorganic processuality” (Ibid.). For the social pathologist, the diagnosis thus consists not in locating a systemic disorder or malfunction; the pathology is found in the absence of transformative growth natural to social lifeprocesses or in the degeneration of that life into “mere inorganic processuality” (Ibid.). In contrast to the organicist view, mere maintenance of form is not sufficient for social life, which is by definition growing, although it is necessary to the extent that form is required for reproduction of that life above a mere organic genus of living: “social processes need to disintegrate in order to integrate” and critique, in this view, “become[s] a medium of life”, respectively (ibid., 95). Importantly, then, as this conception builds critique into the notion of social life, it retains both the necessity and transformative power of social critique as a core task of critical social philosophy without adopting the restrictive ontology of the organistic view.
The processual view of social reality seems a viable scheme for conceptualizing
sociotechnical pathology if we understand technology as prosthetic to the social
lifeprocess, respectively. A sociotechnical arrangement, according to this conception,
is pathological if it either (i) contributes to the stagnation of social life or (ii)
degenerates social life into mere processuality (as a genus of life). The advantage of
this view is that it seems to capture many (if not all) previously discussed social wrongs
in the production of which technical conditions and (partial) causes play a vital role.
For example, it would seem to capture the social wrongs of algorithmic colonialism and
surveillance capitalism in a manner faithful to the (partially) technical constitution of
such wrongs with the social fabric: they are wrong qua pathological in that they stagnate
social life, and the technical mediation of these ideological practices amplifies that
wrongness by making them ubiquitous and opaque, thus escaping reflection by the
social whole. Furthermore, we can also diagnose sociotechnical practices and
arrangements as pathological when they do not necessarily exacerbate but “merely”
reproduce failures of social life. The reproduction of social inequality and structural
oppression with and through automated systems
Importantly, however, the ontological commitments of the processual conception do
not preclude the possibility of social critique. Technology can be understood as
prosthetically complementary to the reproduction of values and ends of social life
without prescribing it these ends in a “naturalistic” manner. That is, the presented ends
of social life can be criticized, although this can only be done from within social life
itself; and indeed, critique is part of that social life
Social critique could be itself pathological, however, by leading to the death of
reproductive ends worth preserving or, conversely, by blocking transformative practice
by preserving societal values
own method, this i
This paper has discussed the sociotechnical constitution and causes of social wrongs qua pathological conditions of social reality. The primary aim has been to introduce and motivate the concept of sociotechnical pathology, which bridges the gap between critical social philosophy and philosophy of technology by framing sociotechnical systems and arrangements as indispensable parts of social (or sociotechnical) ontology, and thereby the analysis and critique of pathological conditions of, or “wrongs-with”, the social fabric. The concept is to aid critical social philosophy in the analysis of social wrongs, such as algorithmic oppression, algorithmic colonialism, surveillance capitalism, among other social ills, such as alienation and loss of meaning. Four conceptions of sociotechnical pathology were discussed:
The anti-theoretical, normativist conception: ‘sociotechnical pathology’ refers to diverse sociotechnically constituted social wrongs with no unifying theoretical structure.
The structural, normativist conception: ‘sociotechnical pathology’ refers to sociotechnically constituted social wrongs which have a common theoretical structure amenable to analysis.
The organistic, naturalist conception: a sociotechnical practice or arrangement is pathological when it obstructs or prevents the reproduction of the values or ends of a social whole.
The processual, naturalist conception: a sociotechnical practice or arrangement is pathological when it stagnates or degenerates the lifeprocess of a social whole.
The general outlines offered here hopefully aid others on their journey towards constructing substantive conceptions of sociotechnical pathology, at least by pointing to some possible pitfalls along the road. In any case, the general argument for the necessity of sociotechnical considerations in analyzing social wrongs can be regarded as independent from this mapping exercise. There are surely other ways of conceptualizing sociotechnical pathologies, but any conception of sociotechnical pathology will plausibly concede some version of the general argument put forth here. Broussard, M. (2018). Artificial unintelligence: How computers misunderstand the world. MIT
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