0191-9067/83 $3.00 + .00 Copyright ® 1984 SUNSAT Energy Council VALUE CHOICES AND TECHNOLOGICAL OPTIONS VICTOR FERKISS Department of Government Georgetown University Washington, DC 20057, USA Current debate about alternative energy futures for the United States and the world as a whole has focused primarily on technological and economic aspects of choices among energy options (1).* However, an important undercurrent in much of the discussion is the purported ethical, political and social implications of the adoption of various technological options. Proponents of a “soft” energy strategy are especially prone to argue that the technological options we choose today will have necessary and predictable consequences for the attainment of cherished values in the future (2-1 l).t Implicit in all these arguments — and sometimes explicit as well — is the contention that particular technologies have essentially simple and direct effects on basic political and social values — nuclear energy will lead to centralized political power or help the poor for example — and that societies can and do seek to give exclusive priority to the implementation of particular values in making their political decisions (12)4 Just as it is sometimes argued that societies must choose between a hard or soft energy path on technical and/or economic grounds so they must — concurrently and as a corollary of their energy choices — decide among conflicting political and social values to be sought. Much of this argument is prefigured in the literature on “appropriate technology” by thinkers such as E. F. Schumacher (13-14). From these assumptions it follows logically that for a society to choose among various technological options it must also in effect choose among alternative social and political futures, and that the latter choice like the first must necessarily be unequivocal. Some have even argued, like Robert L. Heilbroner and Harrison Brown, that the survival of our civilization in an era of energy constraints will *See (1), in which political aspects are treated directly only on pp. 484-485 and 640. • This paper will not deal with the basic question of whether or not the total amount of energy available has a direct relationship to particular political values or to lifestyle generally. It has usually been assumed that there is a direct relationship between the amount of energy available and democracy in the broadest sense, but how direct the relationship is between energy levels and lifestyles is problematical. See (7). Not all observers would accept the idea that high energy consumption is desirable, of course. See (8-10). For a broad recent perspective on energy as such see (II). tWe will deal in this paper solely with the political and social implications of various energy strategies, not their environmental effects.
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