Technology raises many ethical concerns. Some of these are relatively clear-cut, as in the case of risks to health, safety, or environment. In these cases, the implied values are non-controversial, the chance and the possible harm can both be expressed in quantitative terms, and the causal link between technology and consequence is fairly direct and unequivocal. However, technology is also bound to have consequences that are morally ambiguous, qualitative and mediated. New technologies affect established practices, identities, morals, conceptions of the good life and worldviews, thus giving rise to controversies about issues of a less tangible kind: ‘soft impacts’. These controversies are sites where techno-moral learning can occur. The outcomes of these deliberations should inform decisions regarding technological design and/or the societal embedding of the new technologies.
Projects on techno-moral change
- Imagining Techno-moral Change
- Healthy Creativity: The Implicit Normativity of Healthy Citizenship
- A Warrant for Ethical Research: medical ethics and human experimentation in the Netherlands (1945-2000)
- Bio-objects and their boundaries: Governing matters at the intersection of society, politics, and science
- Responsible food innovation
- Practicing the Plastic Brain: popular neuroscience and the good life