Doing Harm with Things: Making Sense of Intention in Harmful Actions Using Technology

Abstract Criminology has increasingly recognized the roles technologies play in an array of harms, with scholars developing a variety of techno-social accounts of crime and harm. In developing such accounts, scholars face the challenge of adequately accounting for the myriad ways humans can, whether intended or not, harm with things. This article argues that this challenge can be addressed by disentangling the concatenation of relations between intentions, actions, ends, and technologies that underpin harmful events. Specifically, we draw on insights from the philosophy of action to generate a typology that establishes the specific relationships between these factors that coalesce when technologies are involved in harmful acts, distinguishing between six ways people can use technology in ways that harm. We then demonstrate the utility of our framework to criminology and zemiology by applying it to two examples: first, we show how our framework can clarify the definitional boundaries of technology-facilitated violence, and second, we explain how the relationship between user intention, actions, and goals can explain the pervasiveness of ‘ordinary’ environmental harms. Our approach complements critical criminological scholarship by bridging micro, meso, and macro approaches to examining the relationship between technology and harm.