Current Debates About the Ethics of New Technology
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INTRODUCTION
Current Debates About the Ethics of New Technology Christopher Nathan
Published online: 26 November 2020 # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
This special section offers a selection of current debates about responsible and ethical innovation, with a view to understanding the future direction of debates about norms around innovation. The section arises from a workshop on ‘The Ethics of Innovation’ that took place at the University of Warwick in 2017. The article by Sven Ove Hansson provides a qualified defence of a much-discussed principle relating to innovation, the precautionary principle. The spirit of the principle is that there should be a bulwark against unknown problems arising from the deployment of new and untested technologies. The principle urges, roughly, that, where there is a threat to health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken, even where there is scientific uncertainty about the existence or extent of the threat. Various specifications of the principle exist in policy documents and beyond, and it is sometimes framed as a version of the principle ‘better safe than sorry’. This might seem excessively cautious, given the benefits that technology can provide, including benefits to health and the environment. Hansson makes the case that the precautionary principle of international and EU laws, in contrast to the precautionary principle of some discussions in academic philosophy and research policy, is a sound principle that expresses an aspect of normal practical reasoning. The article
C. Nathan (*) Department of Politics, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK e-mail: [email protected]
spells this out precisely. Where there are plausible but uncertain dangers, we act as if the danger exists, even in the absence of a full justification for the belief in its existence: ‘Military commanders do not passively wait for full evidence of a suspected enemy attack before taking counter-measures’, a ‘safety engineer will close an elevator for maintenance based on rather weak indications that its cables have been damaged, rather than wait for incontrovertible evidence that this is the case.’ Similarly, in science policy, we may take a ‘bypass route’ from some indicative data—a suspicion of danger—directly to a policy, without subjecting the data to filtering through the corpus of accepted science. What kinds of suspicion can trigger this bypass? It must be more than a ‘mere possibility’, and it should have plausibility that is specific to that risk, in comparison to any ‘alternative postulations’. For example, despite a notoriously fraudulent study, there is no more data suggesting that the MMR vaccine causes autism than there is data suggesting that the MMR vaccine prevents autism, and so the precautionary principle is not invoked. It is interesting to consider how such a principle plays in to very abstract threats or in to scientific practice taken at a very broad level. [2] recently argued that there is a systematic very small danger of a very large catastrophe in the p
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