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Retooling Techno-Moral Scenarios. A Revisited Technique for Exploring Alternative Regimes of Responsibility for Human Enhancement

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Abstract

The techno-moral scenarios (TMS) approach has been developed to explore the interplay between technology, society and morality. Focused on new and emerging sciences and technologies, techno-moral scenarios can be used to inform and enhance public deliberation on the desirability of socio-technical trajectories. The article presents an attempt to hybridise this scenario tool, complementing the focus on ethics with an explicit acknowledgement of the multiple meanings of responsibility and of the plurality of its regimes, i.e. the institutional arrangements presiding over the assumption and assignment of responsibilities. We call this integrated technique ‘rTMS’ to stress the continuity with the original technique and, at the same time, to highlight the additional element we aim to develop: responsibility. The article describes this approach and illustrates a loosely standardised procedure that can be used to organise and conduct public engagement workshops based on rTMS.

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Notes

  1. Boenink, Swierstra and Stemerding define morality as “the set of values and norms that a specific community considers very important, because they refer to legitimate interests, mutual obligations and/or views of the good life. Although the precise boundaries of this set may be contested, morality largely exists in the form of implicit beliefs, routines and practices”. Morality is different from ethics, which is “the reflection and debate on the relevance and status of (parts of) morality; ethics, that is, is reflexive morality. […] [A]nyone questioning or debating moral values and /or norms engages in ethical activity” ( [11], 3).

  2. There is a second, narrower connection between responsibility and the TMS literature. Stemerding [14] and Douglas and Stemerding [15] use TMS in the framework of responsible research and innovation (RRI). RRI is an approach to science and innovation governance developed mainly in the European Union (EU) policy environment, which pursues the alignment of research and innovation activities with societal goals and needs by way of participatory approaches fostering the mutual responsibilisation of science and innovation actors ( [16, 17]). In this context, TMS are used to foster the moral imagination of researchers as a preliminary step to begin a dialogue with societal stakeholders to explore the social and needs priorities that can be responded to by research.

  3. “It should be stressed that the distinction between hard and soft impacts is not neutral or descriptive. Instead, it is a largely rhetorical distinction brought into play by one group of powerful players (policymakers and technology actors) for practical – or strategic – purposes” ( [13], 7).

  4. We follow Gorgoni in naming these four responsibility paradigms. However, this author has argued that the features of RRI reflect a broader understanding of responsibility that is rooted in a specific political-economic framework, namely neoliberalism [30]. The term ‘responsibilisation’ has been used to describe the definition of responsibility typical of this political-economic context and might well be used to label the fourth paradigm identified by Gorgoni [37].

  5. For a general appraisal of vignettes in social science research, see Hughes and Huby [42].

  6. For an example of a video scenario, see, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGQ6Cp1dC4c (accessed September 15, 2018).

  7. To conduct a rTMS exercise, the facilitator can use material aids and tools, such as cards and a ‘game’ board, that can prompt and support the conversation among the workshop participants. In this article, we do not present these details for the sake of clarity and due to limited space.

  8. The distinction is based on the work of Talcott Parsons [43]. Socialisation refers to the incorporation of values and norms in the psychological structure of individuals; institutionalisation refers to the incorporation of select normative models in the social system of incentives and sanctions.

  9. Personas are built upon research data on users and, more generally, social groups and strata. Due to the mock nature of the scenario presented in this article, which was used for testing the procedure with students, the features of the persona who is the scenario protagonist were arbitrarily decided by the author.

  10. This scenario is based on the work of the students of the Galilean School of Advanced Studies of Padova University (Italy), in which rTMS were first tested in may 2017. The classroom discussion and the scenario moved from the mission of Elon Musk’s start-up ‘Neuralink’. The company plans to build a ‘neural lace’, a brain-computer interface technology enabling bi-directional communication between the human brain and computers. The goal of Musk’s venture is to allow humans to run external digital devices and fast download and upload information and data from/to computers to improve their cognitive performance in areas such as memory and information processing. There are many news articles describing Neuralink’s goals (e.g., [46]) and critiquing the feasibility of Musk’s ideas (e.g., [47]).

  11. This distinction has the same pragmatic logic as the differentiation of cooperative/competitive social relations in Step 1.

  12. While this article applies rTMS to HE, the application perimeter of this technique is not limited to this subject and covers the ‘soft impacts’ of new and emerging technologies in general, rather than of specific domains.

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Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. I wish to thank the participants in the mutual learning workshop on “Responsibility and human enhancement” held in Padova, Italy, on May 22, 2017, for their precious comments and suggestions on the first draft of this article. In particular, we would like to express our gratitude to Tsjalling Swierstra who acted as the discussant of this paper during the workshop. Finally, I gratefully acknowledge the funding from the Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF), Flexible Grants for Small Research Groups program, which made it possible to conduct this research as part of the project “Responsibility and Human Enhancement. Concepts, implications and assessments”.

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  1. Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Trieste, Piazzale Europa 1, I-34127, Trieste, Italy

    Simone Arnaldi

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Arnaldi, S. Retooling Techno-Moral Scenarios. A Revisited Technique for Exploring Alternative Regimes of Responsibility for Human Enhancement. Nanoethics 12, 283–300 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11569-018-0329-6

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