Design and Reflective Judgment are central concepts in an argument about the importance of diverse dialogue and perspectives in the shaping technological design (means and ends). But what is that argument, and what is its validity? Why not let a few individuals make the important decisions, such as the experts who can build the technology, or others experts with the vantages points and authority to discern the goals and ends, such as business managers with their typical focus on profitability and efficiency deemed necessary to ensure organizational survival in the marketplace?

Andrew Feenberg's argument derives from Hannah Arendt's Reflective Judgment, which itself rests on reformulated ideas from Immanuel Kant and Socrates. In our paper, we argue that reflective judgment in contrast with determinative judgment, emerges from individual experiences with technology (negative and positive), which is then categorized and legitimized through the sharing of it with others. Like Kant's example of the sharing of individual aesthetic experiences through opinions about a painting or nature, reflective judgments become valid through their sharing, discussion and agreement with others.

Over-simplifying, Socrates believed in the importance of dialogue to cure ignorance through questioning; hence the Socratic Method. A key assumption in the method is the need for individuals to converse with each other, in order to reveal and question their necessarily restricted and idiosyncratic experiences and perceptions of the world, to foster an enlarged mentality.

In drawing upon Immanuel Kant, we confront the moral reasoning in his philosophy which has spurred many future attempts to demonstrate otherwise – a conclusion that fairness, the value of the individual and the autonomy of the will are a priori moral principles that must not be based on experience and results (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kantian_ethics).

to his (and others) moral reasoning. Once such a priori conclusion in Kant is to treat people as ends and not means, and that an ethical

The HICSS paper examines the