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Ethics and Technology ‘in the Making’: An Essay on the Challenge of Nanoethics

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Abstract

After reviewing portions of the 21st Century Nanotechnology Research and Development Act that call for examination of societal and ethical issues, this essay seeks to understand how nanoethics can play a role in nanotechnology development. What can and should nanoethics aim to achieve? The focus of the essay is on the challenges of examining ethical issues with regard to a technology that is still emerging, still ‘in the making.’ The literature of science and technology studies (STS) is used to understand the nanotechnology endeavor in a way that makes room for influence by nanoethics. The analysis emphasizes: the contingency of technology and the many actors involved in its development; a conception of technology as sociotechnical systems; and, the values infused (in a variety of ways) in technology. Nanoethicists can be among the many actors who shape the meaning and materiality of an emerging technology. Nevertheless, there are dangers that nanoethicists should try to avoid. The possibility of being co-opted from working along side nanotechnology engineers and scientists is one danger that is inseparable from trying to influence. Related but somewhat different is the danger of not asking about the worthiness of the nanotechnology enterprise as a social investment in the future.

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Notes

  1. According to the NSTC report “Nanotechnology: Shaping the World Atom by Atom” [15], nanoscience and nanoengineering are “likely to change the way almost everything – from vaccines to computers to automobile tires to objects not yet imagined – is designed and made.”

  2. According to the web site of the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies (http://www.nanotechproject.org/99/ dreaming-of-a-nanotech-christmas), over 350 manufacturer-identified nanotechnology consumer products are available for purchase.

  3. From a U.S. perspective the Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications (ELSI) Program of the Human Genome Project could be considered the first undertaking of this kind. Alternatively, one might argue that the field of bioethics was the first to focus on ethical issues of emerging technologies. Nevertheless, the level of rhetoric and the level of funding suggest that the recent focus on social and ethical implications of nanotechnology while it is in its earliest stages of development is unprecedented.

  4. The activities of the NNI are described at: http://www.nano.gov/.

  5. As the NNI web site describes the NNI is “a federal R&D program established to coordinate the multiagency efforts in nanoscale science, engineering, and technology.” The site also explains that the NNI “is managed within the framework of the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC), the Cabinet-level council by which the President coordinates science, space, and technology policies across the Federal Government.” [See: http://www.nano.gov/]

  6. See McCray [13] for a historical account of the passage of the legislation. To be sure, the motives of the legislators are complex and passage was not a simple process.

  7. The U.S. Congress appears to have taken into account many of the issues raised during the April, 2003 Hearings of the Committee on Science of the House of Representatives. The transcript of this panel hearing gives further insight into the rationale for the law [21].

  8. Mnyusiwalla et al. [14] identify the ethical issues in nanotechnology as “equity, privacy, security, environment, and metaphysical questions concerning human–machine interactions.” Lewenstein [11] identifies them as environmental issues, workforce issues, privacy issues, national and international political issues, intellectual property issues, and human enhancement.

  9. Recognizing nanotechnology development as sociotechnical systems building, Gorman et al. [7] have developed research based on the idea that shared graduate students can be a locus of trading zones in which ideas move across disciplinary boundaries.

  10. While the studies included in Oudshoorn and Pinch [16] do not use the language of values, at least some of the accounts of how users shape technologies (and are shaped by technologies) could be described in the language of values.

  11. Brey’s [2] account of disclosive computer ethics illustrates how ethical analysis can uncover and make clear the values embedded in computer systems.

  12. I am grateful to Rosalyn Berne for crystallizing this idea for me in a personal conversation.

  13. See, for example, Salamanca-Buentello et al. [19] and Invernizzi and Foladori [9].

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  1. Department of Science, Technology & Society, A 237 Thornton Hall, University of Virginia, P.O. Box 400744, 351 McCormick Road, Charlottesville, VA, 22904-4744, USA

    Deborah G. Johnson

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Correspondence to Deborah G. Johnson.

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Johnson, D.G. Ethics and Technology ‘in the Making’: An Essay on the Challenge of Nanoethics. Nanoethics 1, 21–30 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11569-007-0006-7

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