Disruptive Innovation and Moral Uncertainty
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ORIGINAL RESEARCH PAPER
Disruptive Innovation and Moral Uncertainty Philip J. Nickel
Received: 28 March 2019 / Accepted: 10 September 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract This paper develops a philosophical account of moral disruption. According to Robert Baker, moral disruption is a process in which technological innovations undermine established moral norms without clearly leading to a new set of norms. Here I analyze this process in terms of moral uncertainty, formulating a philosophical account with two variants. On the harm account, such uncertainty is always harmful because it blocks our knowledge of our own and others’ moral obligations. On the qualified harm account, there is no harm in cases where moral uncertainty is related to innovation that is “for the best” in historical perspective or where uncertainty is the expression of a deliberative virtue. The two accounts are compared by applying them to Baker’s historical case of the introduction of mechanical ventilation and organ transplantation technologies, as well as the present-day case of mass data practices in the health domain.
Keywords Disruptive innovation . Disruptive technology . Moral disruption . Moral uncertainty . Withdrawal of life support . Ethics of organ transplantation . Data ethics
Introduction In his book Before Bioethics, Robert Baker defines morally disruptive technological innovations as those which “undermine established moral norms or ethical codes” ([1], p. 59).1 Baker’s definition refers to situations in which the established collective moral norms associated with a set of practices are undermined through technological innovation, without new moral norms clearly emerging. This paper explores the nature of such disruption and its impact on individual moral agents. It is hoped that by better understanding the moral impact of technological disruption, we may obtain a new lens for interpreting social and political reactions to disruptive technologies. I shall examine the view that in situations of moral disruption, people are made morally worse off in the respect that they are caused not to know their own moral obligations, or those of others (at least not determinately).2 Let us label this the moral disruption as harm account or simply the harm account. In principle, such an account is relevant to any type of moral disruption, not merely that caused by technological developments. Here, however, I will confine the discussion to cases of technological innovation.
1
P. J. Nickel (*) Department of Philosophy and Ethics, School of Innovation Sciences, Eindhoven University of Technology, PO Box 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven, Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]
Disruptive innovations are defined in terms of their powerful effects on existing products and business models [2, 3]. Morally disruptive technologies usually fall within this class, having powerful non-moral effects as well as moral effects. 2 This analysis concerns uncertain moral norms and obligations: in this respect, it is distinct from the typical analysis of uncertainty in
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