Human nature, the means-ends relationship, and alienation: Themes for potential East–West collaboration

•The paradigm of technology and human nature are two essential issues.•There are many theses on human nature can be integrated based on the means-ends paradigm.•There are various kinds of imbalance between means and ends, which lead to different kinds of alienation.•In the information age, a new kind of alienation emerges, which is different from the material alienation.

This essay identifies two basic themes, human nature and the means-ends relationship, that can both advance philosophical reflection on technology and potentially serve as a basis for East–West collaboration in philosophy. What is central to the philosophy of technology and engineering are questions of how technical activity is related to human nature, both as founded in human nature and contributing to its realization. In the history of human thought, there have been a number of theses about human nature — the human being is a rational animal, a tool making and using animal, and a symbol making and using animal — that can have different implications for such questions. There are nevertheless possibilities for synthesis of different theories that point toward the importance of thinking about technology in terms of the means-ends relationship and the experience of a disharmony in the relationship that has been called alienation. From the perspective of the means-ends relationship, some suggestions are considered for dealing with different forms of alienation. A final suggestion is that some traditions of Chinese philosophy may contribute to advancing efforts to understand human nature and to deal with disharmonies in the means-ends relationship.