Edinburgh Napier University

  This article explores the relevance of social engineering for the
postindustrial epoch. The concept of social engineering has been
dormant in recent years, stained by the behavior of police states
in the 20th century. Yet stripped of its excesses, social engineering
still represents a defensible moral and political enterprise. What
is needed for the 21st century, however, is a chastened, deontological
theory of social engineering, one that accepts the inviolability
of the person while still pursuing ambitious long-term teleological
strategies through state action. For its content, progressive information
society policy should revisit the ethical norms developed
by the left-liberal tradition, as articulated by the late John Rawls
and others. The article concludes that the information age offers a
new opportunity to engineer a just social order, or, at any rate, that
the policymaking community needs to re evaluate the idea of social
engineering.