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Nanotechnology, Development and Buddhist Values

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Abstract

Nanotechnology has been proclaimed as a new technology that could bridge the gap between the rich and the poor countries. Indeed many countries in Asia are fast developing their nanotechnological capabilities. However, one needs to take into consideration the role that culture and values play in adoption of nanotechnological policies, keeping in mind that technology and culture are deeply dependent on each other. I offer a criticism of the dependency theory in economic development, which says that there is an unbridgeable divide that the poorer countries cannot cross. As with other powerful technologies, nanotechnology can create as many problems as solutions. I concentrate how insights from the Buddhist tradition, prevalent in Thailand, could illuminate how nanotechnology could be introduced into the lifeworld of a people.

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Notes

  1. An issue of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication is devoted to the topic of religions on the Internet. See http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue3/ especially articles by Campbell [4], Helland [16], Fukamizu [12] and others.

  2. Here I disagree with Allhoff’s argument that nanoethics does not belong to its own field. Surely enough nanoethics does belong to the field of applied ethics, as are fields such as bioethics and computer ethics, which are more established. As cases can be made regarding bioethics as a distinct field within applied ethics, so too can nanoethics. It is indeed that case that many works in bioethics draw heavily from ethics and other disciplines. However, that does not make bioethics lose its status as a distinct subfield. The same argument, I believe, can be made with nanoethics (see [2]). As problems in bioethics arise from the use of technologies pertaining to biology and human life, problems in nanoethics similarly arise from the use of technologies pertaining to very small things that could have strong impact on human life and society too.

  3. Literature on Buddhism is tremendously vast. What I offered in this paragraph is only a very basic introduction. However, Harvey [13] is a very good introduction.

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Acknowledgements

Research for this paper is partially supported by the Center for Innovative Nanotechnology, Chulalongkorn University. I would like to thank Prof. Supot Hannongbua, Director of the Center, for his unfailing support and encouragement. This paper first saw its life as a presentation at a conference on “Science, Technology and Human Values in the Context of Asian Development” at the National University of Singapore in April 2008. My thanks also go to Edward Moad for inviting me to the conference. Moreover, research and writing this paper also took place at the ideal environment of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, where I stayed as a scholar of the Erasmus Mundus Program. I would like to thank May Thorseth for her generous hospitality. Lastly, my thanks are due to the anonymous reviewers of an earlier draft of this paper, whose comments led to many improvements and have prevented me from many mistakes.

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  1. Center for Ethics of Science and Technology and Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, 10330, Thailand

    Soraj Hongladarom

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Correspondence to Soraj Hongladarom.

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Hongladarom, S. Nanotechnology, Development and Buddhist Values. Nanoethics 3, 97–107 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11569-009-0062-2

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