Ethical ambiguity and advancing nanotechnology

Filed in archive Society & Ethics on November 1, 2006

In Goods and Goodies: The Place of Normative Issues in Technology Development, Duquesne University associate professor Charles T. Rubin frames current ethical concerns over advancing nanotechnology, not as a battle between the ethical and unethical, but as a conflict between differing ethical aims:

When it comes to ethical concerns about emerging technologies, the issue is not that some group "with an agenda" wants to stand in the way of scientists, engineers, and developers who just want to get on with their work -- or of human progress as a whole. What is at issue is a normative conflict -- divergent visions of the way the world ought to be, of what progress means -- pure and simple. Even the claim that scientific research should proceed unobstructed by moral scruples is itself a moral scruple about the value of the free exchange of ideas.

It is enough to recognize that research in science and technology is done not just to be done; rather, it is conducted with some good in mind. Ethical evaluation is, therefore, no intrusion upon it, but instead inherent in its very doing. The question then is not whether ethics will play a role in the new world we are creating, but whether it will do so explicitly and thoughtfully.

His essay appears in the latest issue of Nano & Society from the Center on Nanotechnology and Society.