A Collaborative Platform for Experiments in Ethics and Technology

Abstract

This chapter describes the NERD platform: a web-based research instrument designed to support collaborative experimental research in the ethics of technology. Starting with our research group’s goal to study democratic ethics, we sketch the resulting problems of public participation: the need to reconcile cheap large-scale methods with deep ethical engagement. We argue that our combination of scenario-based surveys and experiments can provide both ethically and experimentally significant data; results from our recent survey experiments support our claims, showing how large numbers of participants evaluate technologies ranging from genetic testing to genetically modified fish and pigs. While the initial use has been focused on the ethics of biotechnology, our approach unifies diverse ethical approaches, from bioethics to environmental ethics and is designed to generalize to any controversial issue with significant technical content. We discuss two aspects of the project of interest to engineers and philosophers: our platform is designed to stress test ethical decision making and some assumptions that social science and philosophy bring to applied ethics.