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What’s Different, Ethically, About Nanotechnology?: Foundational Questions and Answers

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Abstract

Whether nanotechnology is ethically unique and “nanoethics” should be treated as a field in its own right remain important, contested issues. This essay seeks to contribute to the debates on these issues by exploring several foundational questions about the relationship of ethics and nanotechnology. Ethical issues related to nanotechnology exist and adoption of a defeasible presumption that such issues amount to old ethical wine in new technological bottles appears justified. Such issues are not engendered solely by intrinsic features of the nanotechnology field, but also by contingent features of the social contexts in which work in the field unfolds. The sets of factors that engender ethical issues related to nanotechnology are combinations of social-contextual and technical elements. While there do not appear to be any qualitatively new nanotechnology-related ethical issues, nanotechnology is different, ethically, from other fields of technical inquiry in at least two ways. To avoid diluting ethical concern about nanotechnology and revival of the noxious notions of autonomous technology and technological determinism, thinking, writing, and speaking about ‘nanoethics’ should yield to thinking, writing, and speaking about ‘ethical issues related to nanotechnology in society.’ Finally, nanotechnology practitioners should become familiar with the ethical dimension of their work.

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Notes

  1. ‘An ethical perspective’ is to be understood here as ‘a perspective of ethics,’ and to be contrasted with, say, ‘a legal perspective’ or ‘an aesthetic perspective.’

  2. In some cases the assessment might be of a closely related practice or policy instead of an action.

  3. For the present writer, whether an issue is properly termed an ethical issue, i.e., one that falls within the domain of ethics, hinges ultimately on whether the playing out of related actions or practices bears significantly on the well-being and protectable interests of affected parties.

  4. The National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network (NNIN) is a network of U.S. university-based nanotechnology research laboratories that is supported in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). Hereafter, this survey, whose focus was the views of nanotechnology researchers about ethical issues related to their work, will be referred to as ‘the NNIN ethics survey.’ See R. McGinn [6].

  5. Among respondents who somewhat or strongly agreed that significant ethical issues related to nanotechnology exist, 61.5% were quite or very interested in them, while only 7.8% were slightly interested in them and .8% were not at all interested (McGinn [6]: 106).

  6. van de Poel distinguishes “two different notions of ‘newness’” of technology-related ethical issues. “[O]ne is that an ethical issue is new if it is not raised by an existing technology or not dealt with in another field of applied ethics” (van de Poel [10]: 31). (Note: it is likely that he meant to write “...if it is not raised by an existing technology and not dealt with in any other field of applied ethics”). His second notion is that “an ethical issue is new if we (still) lack adequate normative standards to deal with it” (ibid.). This is a more problematic sense of “new,” since, under it, whether or not a technology-related ethical issue qualifies as “new” depends on judgments being made about whether existing normative standards are “adequate...to deal with it.” The vagueness of this criterion invites the proliferation of nanotechnology-related ethical issues deemed “new,” something not in its favor.

  7. According to Grunwald, “New questions are also posed by the fact that previously separate lines of ethical reflection converge in the field of nanotechnology” (2005: 187). However, he does not appear to identify any such specific new questions, referring only to “the integrative and cross-sectional nature of many ethical challenges” posed by nanotechnology. He also writes of “new topics and questions” being “concentrated in nanotechnology,” but with no greater specificity (ibid.: 198).

  8. Interestingly, just as Godman speaks of ethical issues related to nanotechnology as being unique to different degrees, Swierstra and Rip refer to ethical issues as being ‘specific to nanotechnology’ to different degrees, e.g., “somewhat specific to nanotechnology” (Swierstra and Rip [9]: 16).

  9. The expression ‘nanotechnology field’ is intended to encompass elemental nanotechnology phenomena and products.

  10. The degrees to which a given nanotechnology-related ethical issue is attributable to intrinsic features of the nanotechnology field and to contingent extrinsic features of the societal contexts involved will typically vary from issue to issue.

  11. In the 1990s, the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health devoted 3–5% of their annual Human Genome Project (HGP) budgets to supporting study of the ethical, legal, and social issues raised by the availability of new human genetic information. This came to be known as the ELSI program. It might seem, therefore, that NSF’s stipulation regarding study of “social and ethical implications” (SEI) is not unprecedented, hence that this is not a respect in which nanotechnology differs, ethically, from all other technologies. But the difference is that in the case of nanotechnology, study of its “social and ethical implications” is to be done as a constituent part of the mission of the consortium doing the research, not outsourced to scholars outside the enterprise, as with the HGP.

  12. Asked about their degree of agreement with the proposition that “Academic researchers in nanotechnology have an ethical responsibility for the effects that new nanomaterials and nanodevices have on society,” 65.3% of respondents somewhat or strongly agreed, 18% somewhat or strongly disagreed, and 5% agreed as much as disagreed.

  13. Examination of ethical issues related to nanotechnology falls within the scope of the cross-cutting subfield of applied ethics that John Harris calls “the ethics of science and technology.” See John Harris [14]. Interestingly, Grunwald uses the identical expression. (Grunwald [8]: 192).

  14. As seen in the section ‘Should Nanoethics Be Designated a Distinctive Subfield of Applied Ethics?,’ in their 2006 article Allhoff and Lin defended the view that nanoethics is a distinctive field in its own right (Allhoff and Lin [11]). However, a year later, in “On the Autonomy and Justification of Nanoethics,” Allhoff espoused a different position. Having identified a number of ethical issues related to nanotechnology, he concluded that, “none of them is new or novel in any substantial way” (Allhoff [7]: 193). Moreover, he argued against the notion that although “the issues themselves might not be unique, they nevertheless are instantiated to such a degree that extant moral frameworks will be ill-equipped to handle them” (Allhoff [7]: 185). Instead, he concluded that while there is no “metaphysical” justification for regarding nanoethics as a distinctive field, viewing nanoethics as such can be justified “pragmatically” (Allhoff [7]: 206). For Allhoff, this means that in light of “the impacts that nanotechnology will have on society,” “nanotechnology deserves ethical attention” and nanotechnologies “must be evaluated along whatever ethical dimensions they manifest effects, whether well-being, rights and liberties, fairness, or whatever” (Allhoff [7]: 207). Although the present writer’s views are considerably closer to Allhoff’s 2007 position than to his (and Lin’s) 2006 position, I submit that, as argued in this section, the goal of coming seriously to grips with ethical issues engendered jointly by nanotechnology and its societal contexts is best served by jettisoning talk of ‘nanoethics’ in favor of talk about ‘ethical issues related to nanotechnology in society.’

  15. See the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering, “Nanoscience and Nanotechnologies: Opportunities and Uncertainties,” RS Policy Document 19/04, July 2004, p. 87, Recommendation 17. See also http://www.royalsoc.ac.uk and http://www.raeng.org.uk.

  16. 42 U.S.C. 18620–1. See, for example, http://www.nist.gov/mep/upload/PL110-69_8907.pdf. Persuant to Section 7009, in January 2010 NSF began requiring that applications for research funding include research-ethics training plans. See http://edocket.access.gpo.gov/2009/E9-19930.htm.

  17. Only about a fifth of the respondents believed themselves to be quite (15.9%) or very well (5.6%) informed about ethical issues related to nanotechnology, whereas almost four fifths rated themselves not at all (10.5%), slightly (31.8%), or moderately (34.6%) well informed about these issues (McGinn [6]: 115).

  18. Almost two thirds (63.1%) of the NNIN ethics survey respondents agreed quite a bit or very much that study of such issues should become a standard part of future engineering and science education, while only 14.9% indicated that they supported this change slightly or not at all (McGinn [6]: 117).

  19. In the NNIN ethics survey, of the 516 respondents who somewhat or strongly agreed that significant ethical issues related to nanotechnology exist and who answered the ensuing ‘interest’ item, 61.5% were quite or very interested in such issues, whereas only 7.8% were slightly interested in them and 0.8% were not at all interested. Thus among respondents who agreed that significant ethical issues related to nanotechnology exist, there was little indifference to such issues (McGinn [6]: 104–105).

  20. The micro-social domain is the everyday work world of the nanotechnology practitioners, i.e., R&D laboratories and manufacturing facilities. The meso-social domain is the domain that encompasses interactions between nanotechnology practitioners from the micro-social domain and representatives of mediating societal institutions and organizations, such as funding and media organizations, and policy-making institutions (executive, legislative, regulatory, and legal). The macro-social domain is the domain of society at large, at either the local, regional, national, or global level.

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Acknowledgment

I wish to acknowledge the valuable criticisms made by an anonymous referee and the editor’s helpful suggestions regarding the scholarly literature. The wording of the title question is due to Keith Baker.

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  1. c/o Department of Management Science and Engineering, School of Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 94305-4026, USA

    Robert E. McGinn

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McGinn, R.E. What’s Different, Ethically, About Nanotechnology?: Foundational Questions and Answers. Nanoethics 4, 115–128 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11569-010-0089-4

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