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Philosophy and Engineering: pp 239–252Cite as

A Collaborative Platform for Experiments in Ethics and Technology

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Part of the book series: Philosophy of Engineering and Technology ((POET,volume 2))

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.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Granted, there is a bias toward English, but we are now working on a remedy: our Animal Use in Research survey has been translated into Portuguese by Brazilian collaborators and is currently being translated into Japanese as well. The ease with which our content management system supports internationalization is another way a platform facilitates collaboration.

  2. 2.

    The slight upward – that is less approving – trend in the human case is obscured by representation of the neutral median, for question 10.

  3. 3.

    Adapted from Schuppli and Weary (2007) to address a larger sample.

  4. 4.

    The six filled nodes are the questions and the non-colored ovals are advice pages. The boxes are text inputs; both participants left one comment.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to the NERD research group and to the participants in our survey experiments. This research is funded by Genome Canada for Building a GE3LS Architecture (Burgess and Danielson) and SSHRC for Modeling Moral Mechanisms (Danielson).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of British Columbia, Centre for Applied Ethics, Vancouver, BC, Canada

    Peter Danielson

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  1. Peter Danielson
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Correspondence to Peter Danielson .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. PO Box 5015, Delft, 2600 GA, Netherlands

    Ibo Poel

  2. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, S. Mathews Avenue 104, Urbana, 61801, U.S.A.

    David Goldberg

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Danielson, P. (2009). A Collaborative Platform for Experiments in Ethics and Technology. In: Poel, I., Goldberg, D. (eds) Philosophy and Engineering:. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-2804-4_20

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