Introduction to the Ethics of New and Emerging Science and Technology

Abstract

This chapter reconstructs the patterns of moral argumentation typical for debates between enthusiastic proponents and skeptic opponents about the (expected) impacts of technologies. These patterns frame how issues are viewed and constitute a tool kit on which discussants draw. Section “General Definitions” briefly explains key concepts like morality and different types of ethics and offers a reflection on the relation between morality, ethics, and technology. Section “Visions of Technological Development” discusses two perspectives on technological development that play an important role in the preliminary debate whether ethical assessment of technology makes any sense in the first place: technological determinism and voluntarism. Section “Meta-Ethics” introduces the reader to two meta-ethical arguments regarding the dynamic relation between ethics and technology. The first concerns the likelihood that the NEST will eventually confront us with problems. Here optimists and skeptics or pessimists oppose one another. The second meta-ethical issue is whether morality must adapt to technology or vice versa. Section “Normative Ethics” provides an overview of the normative ethical arguments in favor of a certain proposed technology and juxtaposes them to the arguments used by more skeptical opponents. The arguments are grouped according whether they regard consequences, principles, justice, or conceptions of the good life. In the concluding section ”To Conclude,” I point out some ways in which real-life deliberations and discussions about NEST benefit from knowing these arguments and argumentative patterns.