Following her primary, secondary and high school education in Ankara, Tuba Nur Umut completed her undergraduate education at Ankara University, Theology Department (2008) and Ahmet Yesevi University, Management Information Systems Department (2007). In 2009, she started her doctoral studies at Ankara University Institute of Social Sciences, Department of History of Philosophy (Philosophy and Religious Sciences). She was appointed as a research assistant to Ankara University Faculty of Theology, Department of History of Philosophy in 2012. She completed his doctoral thesis titled “Technology-Value Relationship” in 2018. She spent various periods in higher education institutions in Egypt (2009), USA (2012-13), France (2017), and Pakistan (2019-20) for education and research. Since 2020, she has been working as a faculty member at Ankara University, Faculty of Theology, Department of History of Philosophy and teaching undergraduate and graduate courses. Umut works in the fields of philosophy of technology, moral philosophy, applied ethics and contemporary Islamic thought.

In contemporary philosophical thought, we encounter various views that characterize technologies as agents/moral agents. Attributing agency to objects that do not have intention and will, and to which we cannot attribute responsibility, may be considered a rather contradictory attempt by most of us. As a matter of fact, in the generally accepted approach in the theory of action, the acts of human beings are considered “acts”, not the acts of technological products. Similarly, it is not the objects that people produce or use, but the agents themselves that can be morally evaluated. Non-human beings fall outside the scope of moral agency status. Understanding what approaches that stating that technologies are moving beyond being neutral and passive tools, and that call attention to the blurring of boundaries between humans and technologies, and that call for a reinterpretation of the human as autonomous moral agent, are claiming when they ascribe agency to technologies and why they go to such a conceptualization requires taking into account both the ontology proposed in our time, contemporary moral debates, and technological culture. In this talk, the intentions of different approaches that characterize technologies as agents will be laid out, the background that enables this conceptualization will be pointed out, and the philosophical implications of this characterization will be highlighted.