This paper attempts some predictions about the social consequences of nanotechnology and the ethical issues they raise. I set out four features of nanotechnology that are likely to be important in determining its impact and argue that nanotechnology will have significant social impacts in—at least—the areas of health and medicine, the balance of power between citizens and governments, and the balance of power between citizens and corporations. More importantly, responding to the challenge of nanotechnology will require confronting “philosophical” questions about (...) the sort of society we wish to create and the role that technology might play in creating it. This in turn will require developing institutions and processes that allow the public to wield real power in relation to technological trajectories. My ultimate contention is that the immediate task established by the likely social impacts of nanotechnology is not so much to develop an ethics of nanotechnology as to facilitate an ethical conversation about nanotechnology. (shrink)

Issues of responsibility in the world of nanotechnology are becoming explicit with the emergence of a discourse on ‘responsible development’ of nanoscience and nanotechnologies. Much of this discourse centres on the ambivalences of nanotechnology and of promising technology in general. Actors must find means of dealing with these ambivalences. Actors’ actions and responses to ambivalence are shaped by their position and context, along with strategic games they are involved in, together with other actors. A number of interviews were conducted with (...) industrial actors with the aim of uncovering their ethical stances towards responsible development of nanotechnology. The data shows that standard repertoires of justification of nanotechnological development were used. Thus, the industrial actors fell back on their position and associated responsibilities. Such responses reinforce a division of moral labour in which industrial actors and scientists can focus on the progress of science and technology, while other actors, such as NGOs, are expected to take care of broader considerations, such as ethical and social issues. (shrink)

Mobile health is rapidly being implemented and changing our ways of doing, understanding and organising healthcare. mHealth includes wearable devices as well as apps that track fitness, offer wellness programmes or provide tools to manage chronic conditions. According to industry and policy makers, these systems offer efficient and cost-effective solutions for disease prevention and self-management. While this development raises many ethically relevant questions, so far mHealth has received only little attention in medical ethics. This paper provides an overview of bioethical (...) issues raised by mHealth and aims to draw scholarly attention to the ethical significance of its promises and challenges. We show that the overly positive promises of mHealth need to be nuanced and their desirability critically assessed. Finally, we offer suggestions to bioethicists to engage with this emerging trend in healthcare to develop mHealth to its best potential in a morally sound way. (shrink)

Technology corporations and the emerging digital health market are exerting increasing influence over the public healthcare agendas forming around the application of mobile medical devices. By promising quick and cost-effective technological solutions to complex healthcare problems, they are attracting the interest of funders, researchers, and policymakers. They are also shaping the public facing discourse, advancing an overwhelmingly positive narrative predicting the benefits of wearable medical devices to include personalised medicine, improved efficiency and quality of care, the empowering of under-resourced communities, (...) and delivery of health services previously unavailable to the citizens of developing countries. Typically techno-optimist in their description, the key barriers to this impending inflection point in healthcare are identified as technical issues such as short battery life and a lack of data protection. However, this tech innovation narrative is consistent with problematic ethical, social, and political assumptions that have practical and normative effects, and risk, one, undermining the real clinical potential of wearable devices and, two, designing social inequality and injustice into our mobile health interventions in global healthcare. I argue that the foundational assumptions dealing with the just distribution of healthcare ‘goods’, the individual as part of society, and the political framing of future healthcare policy devalue equity and despite what they promise cannot meet the distinctive needs of individuals and groups that do not conform to a standardised concept of care-receiver. (shrink)

In this paper, the author aims to show that transhumanists are confused about their own conception of the posthuman: transhumanists anticipate radical transformation of the human through technology and at the same time assume that the criteria to determine what is “normal” and what is “enhanced” are univocal, both in our present time and in the future. Inspired by Nietzsche’s notion of the Overhuman, the author argues that the slightest “historical and phenomenological sense” discloses copious variations of criteria, both diachronic (...) and synchronic, for what can be considered “normal” and “enhanced.” Radical transformation through technology does not simply enable us to become “stronger,” “smarter,” or “healthier,” but it can and often will also change the very standard or yardstick with which we measure what counts as “stronger,” “smarter,” or “healthier.” Put yet differently: new and emerging technologies are not neutral means but often bring about different and, from our current perspective, foreign standards for determining what are “normal” and “enhanced” capacities. Since the qualitative meanings of these terms are themselves not fixed, it is unintelligible and too reassuring to simply predict that new technologies will enhance human beings. (shrink)

It is often claimed that the development of nanotechnology will constitute a “technological revolution” with profound social, economic, and political consequences. The full implications of this claim can best be understood by imagining a scenario in which a political revolutionary made all the same claims that are commonly made by enthusiasts for nanotechnology. I argue that most people would be outraged to learn that the members of an unelected group were planning to radically reshape society in this fashion. I survey (...) a number of arguments that might be used to block this analogy and argue that none of them justify drawing a sharp distinction between social change due to technology and change due to other political causes. Two things follow for discussions of the social impacts of nanotechnology. First, we need to reconsider the appropriateness of the language of technological revolution when talking about nanotechnology. The likely impacts of nanotechnology may be less dramatic than is often claimed. Second, if we do decide that the language of revolution is the appropriate one to use when talking about nanotechnology then we should acknowledge that any such revolution should be delayed until the public has had a chance to make a democratic decision about whether they wish their lives to be transformed in this way. (shrink)