TèchnoSophìa 3.3 The necessity of an ethics of Tecnē.

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The entire Socratic gesture arises from a single observation: no technique bears within itself the criterion of its own use, because it is nothing more than a set of means ordered to ends that must be chosen elsewhere. Hence Socrates’ decisive polemic against the Sophists: figures endowed with great operative power, yet lacking any explicit anchoring in the moral legitimacy of what they were making possible.

Socrates is among the first to recognize that a téchne deprived of ethical guidance is intrinsically dangerous. Every executive power, if left unquestioned, tends to slide into arbitrary power. Technique naturally tends toward efficiency, and efficiency, if left to itself, can turn into an absolute that erases every measure. Hubris is the name of this structural risk, and hence the need for a sophía that traverses and orients téchne.

This realization is even more central today, because the pursuit of speed and efficiency has become paranoid, and exposes us daily to apparent necessities that consume all the space that could have been devoted to the search for an end for the technological means at our disposal.

The question “What is the good?” does not arise from within téchne, and yet it must constitute its normative horizon. No standardized procedure and no algorithm can autonomously decide what is just. In some cases they can calculate how to reach it once it has been defined; in others they can accelerate its attainment, but never do they establish its boundaries. In technical thinking, justice functions as input, not as output. It can be modeled, described, approximated, but it is not produced by a calculation.

Here Socrates introduces a crucial notion: moral competence, the capacity to give an account of one’s ends. He asks, “How does it work?” and immediately afterward, “Why are we doing this?” This is the reflective operation that prevents téchne from hardening into a corporate policy.

Ethics thus functions as a technology of the limit, akin to what the Sophists had glimpsed without ever truly learning to govern it: to define a limit not with obstructionist intent, but as a guide that channels operative power toward an end that exalts human freedom and dignity. Maieutics is an exercise in responsibility that compels the interlocutor to render transparent the application of such limits to their action.