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.

Hannah Arendt expands the possibility for reflective judgment beyond Kant's examples of paintings and nature to argue for a politics of conversation based on it. In doing so, she draws upon philosophers which informed Kant, particularly Socrates. A key idea in Arendt's formulation from Socrates is (paraphrasing) a belief in both the diversity and limits of individuals' knowledge of a shared world. As such, individuals are partial knowers of this shared world, and enter into discussions on a equal footing, expressing “it appears to me” as a basis for discussion, not an “I know”. (see Basurto, A. (2016). Hannah Arendt’s Kantian Socrates: Moral and Political Judging. Teoria Politica, 6, Article 6.)

Socrates thus 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.

“Critical thinking is possible only where the standpoints of all others are open to inspection. Hence, critical thinking, while still a solitary business, does not cut itself off from ‘all others.’ To be sure, it still goes on in isolation, but by the force of imagination it makes the others present and thus moves in a space that is potentially public, open to all sides; in other words, it adopts the position of Kant’s world citizen. To think with an enlarged mentality means that one trains one’s imagination to go visiting.”

– Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy

(cited in https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/critical-thinking-judgment-and-empathy-2015-04-20)

However, in drawing upon Immanuel Kant through Arendt and back to Socrates, we confront a moral reasoning that reaches conclusions through a priori conclusions that are not based on experience or results – that fairness, the value of the individual and the autonomy of the will are a priori moral principles which we are obliged to follow (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kantian_ethics).