The challenges posed by modern science and technology to ethics include the challenge of technicization. Technicization is a process that some contend infects and thereby corrupts ethics. To understand this claim requires an understanding of the process of technicization (related terms: technicism, technization, technicalization, scientism, scientization, mechanization) in relation to the task of ethical reflection.

Technological civilization is made up not only of machines but also and more importantly the methods or "techniques" that produce machines. Technique is rooted in the human capacity for language that gives humans the ability to imagine ever-new goals and the means to achieve them. For most of human history techniques were embedded in a wider array of cultural beliefs and practices and passed on as part of the culture from one generation to the next. One did things in a certain way because that was how one's ancestors did them. Such techniques...