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Pervasive Normativity and Emerging Technologies

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Ethics on the Laboratory Floor

Abstract

Normativity is everywhere. It is taken up in ethics, but also in law and political theory, and more implicitly in economics and sociology. And there is the de facto normativity of master narratives and imaginaries,1 like the modernist narrative of progress—in particular progress through science. There is also, underlying many normative issues, the fundamental challenge (die ärgerliche Tatsache) of social order, as a value in its own right, and thus to be conserved, and/or as a constraint that needs to be opened up. This essential ambivalence of social order feeds into the discourse about innovation, which can be embraced as wonderful, or criticised as deviant and possibly dangerous (cf. Godin 2010). Issues thrown up by emerging technologies partake in this fundamental challenge, and are thus broader (and deeper) than questions of risk and other immediate effects on society.

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Authors
  1. Arie Rip
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. IQ Healthcare, the Netherlands

    Simone van der Burg

  2. Universiteit Maastricht, the Netherlands

    Tsjalling Swierstra

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© 2013 Arie Rip

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Rip, A. (2013). Pervasive Normativity and Emerging Technologies. In: van der Burg, S., Swierstra, T. (eds) Ethics on the Laboratory Floor. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137002938_11

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