Abstract
Research and Development (R&D) of new technologies increasingly takes place in networks of different organizations and actors. In this contribution, we present an approach that was developed at Delft University of Technology for addressing ethical issues in R&D. The approach takes the engineers and scientists involved in R&D as entry point for discerning and discussing ethical issues and is to be carried out parallel to the R&D trajectory. On the basis of two cases studies, the network approach is described in detail including its strengths and weaknesses. Two procedural norms for assessing an R&D network are discussed, viz. inclusiveness and second-order learning. Some of the main advantages of the approach are that it offers the possibility to identify moral issues in situations of uncertainty and indeterminacy about the final consequences of technological innovations, while being applied already at the early stages of technological development. Because the moral issues are identified in their real-world context, the approach can generate insights that immediately influence R&D and design decisions. As such, the approach may help focusing the technical work in a way that moral issues are better addressed.
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Notes
- 1.
Although this claim may in general be true, it should be noted that many technologies are being developed in a host of other contexts, such as the military sector, which are not always uncontroversial. The notion of dual-use technology has been introduced to refer to research and technology with the potential both to yield valuable scientific knowledge and to be used for purposes with potentially serious detrimental consequences. Although dual-use is as old as engineering and design, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and recent developments in the life sciences have renewed the attention for the topic (Van der Bruggen 2012). The moral assessment of dual-use technologies and the prevention of its harmful use is currently one of the most debated topics engineering ethics (cf. the recent special issue on “The Advancement of Science and the Dilemma of Dual Use” in the journal Science and Engineering Ethics; (Spier 2010)).
- 2.
Note that the authors do not use the broader definition of actor as proposed in Actor-Network-Theory.
- 3.
The underlying thought is that people do not have to agree on substantive conditions which tell when a person is responsible as long as they agree on the procedure for distributing the responsibilities (and given that they have a shared understanding of what responsibility means. The latter is important to prevent people from talking at cross-purposes). If such a procedure, or its outcome, is accepted by all people involved as representing the “fair terms of cooperation,” this might help reconciling the different responsibility conceptions and, ultimately, make sure that the important issues are indeed addressed.
- 4.
A use case is a prose description of the system’s actions that are required to perform a certain task. It describes the system’s behavior when interacting with an agent outside the system (i.e. a user). The use case is detailed into several use-case scenarios, which each describe a different use-case “flow of events” or “‘path” through the use case (Jacobson and Ng 2005, p. 54). Since its introduction in 1987 by Jacobsen, use-case modeling has become the standard in software and systems engineering to elicit the needs of stakeholders and to capture requirements. As such it provides early validation of what needs to be built into the system (Jacobson 1987; Jacobson and Ng 2005).
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Acknowledgments
Neelke Doorn acknowledges the Brocher Foundation, which provided her with the opportunity to work on this paper during her stay at the Centre as visiting researcher in fall 2011.
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van de Poel, I., Doorn, N. (2013). Ethical Parallel Research: A Network Approach for Moral Evaluation (NAME). In: Doorn, N., Schuurbiers, D., van de Poel, I., Gorman, M. (eds) Early engagement and new technologies: Opening up the laboratory. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 16. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7844-3_6
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