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The Social Impacts of Nanotechnology: an Ethical and Political Analysis

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Abstract

This paper attempts some predictions about the social consequences of nanotechnology and the ethical issues they raise. I set out four features of nanotechnology that are likely to be important in determining its impact and argue that nanotechnology will have significant social impacts in—at least—the areas of health and medicine, the balance of power between citizens and governments, and the balance of power between citizens and corporations. More importantly, responding to the challenge of nanotechnology will require confronting “philosophical” questions about the sort of society we wish to create and the role that technology might play in creating it. This in turn will require developing institutions and processes that allow the public to wield real power in relation to technological trajectories. My ultimate contention is that the immediate task established by the likely social impacts of nanotechnology is not so much to develop an ethics of nanotechnology as to facilitate an ethical conversation about nanotechnology.

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Notes

  1. Notable exceptions to this rule include: UNESCO (2006); and, Hodge et al. (2007).

  2. As I note below, equivocation on this question is often used as a method to forestall criticism of nanotechnology.

  3. This is not to deny that technology developed by and/or for the military may not have civilian uses. However, defence of military R&D in terms of its “spinoffs” neglects the fact that the purported benefits of this research could almost always have been secured more efficiently and quickly by civilian research, had the funding for such research been available. To count such spinoffs as “benefits” of military research is therefore misleading unless it can be shown that these products could not have been made available by a comparable civilian research effort.

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  1. School of Philosophy and Bioethics, Faculty of Arts, Monash University, Victoria, 3800, Australia

    Robert Sparrow

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Sparrow, R. The Social Impacts of Nanotechnology: an Ethical and Political Analysis. Bioethical Inquiry 6, 13–23 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11673-009-9139-4

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