Ethics on the Laboratory Floor

Kenneth A. Loparo, T. Swierstra, Kenneth A. Loparo, T. Swierstra

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137002938
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Philosophie et éthique en sciences

This volume unites ethicists and social scientists to contribute to a new type of technology ethics. Cooperation with scientists makes it possible to anticipate ethical questions and problems at a stage when the technology can still be changed.

Part I

Moral Philosophers in the Laboratory

1

Which Focus for an Ethics in Nanotechnology Laboratories?

Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent

Introduction

Over the last decade, ethics has been institutionalised as an integral part of nanotechnology research. This integration was a response to the alert ‘Mind the gap’, which was launched in 2003. ‘As the science leaps ahead, the ethics lags behind. There is danger of derailing NT [nanotechnology] if the study of ethical, legal, and social implications does not catch up with the speed of scientific development’ (Mnyusiwalla et al. 2003). One year later, the report of the Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineering in Great Britain Nanoscience and Nanotechnology: Opportunities and Uncertainties also pointed to the gap between technology and ethics, and made a similar claim about the gap between science and the public (Royal Society and Royal Academy of Engineering 2004).

The implication of ethics in the regime of ‘normal science’ has been favoured by the repeated calls for ‘responsible innovation’ from the promoters of nanotechnology initiatives. Such calls testified, to a certain degree, to the awareness that previous practices of innovation ‘in the name of progress’ were not responsible enough. It is clear that the motto of the 1933 Chicago World Fair—science finds, industry applies, man conforms—is no longer acceptable. However, over the last few decades the ethical concern about scientific and technological choices has prompted new research directions. Instead of the creation of ethics committees, concern around responsibility resulted in the implementation of research programmes on ethical, legal and social implications (ELSI) being integrated in the national nano-initiatives. Thanks to the generous funding of the nano-initiatives dedicated to ELSI, nanoethics has become a booming research field with a growing community of scholars and a journal, NanoEthics, which was founded in 2007.

As they deal with effects, ELSI research programmes are focused mainly on the technological applications of current research. They tend to forget the present in favour of speculative futures. To what extent could the proposal of an ethics on the laboratory floor help to refocus on the present and foster ethical judgements? What kind of ethics could be developed on this site?

In this chapter I will first argue that, when taken seriously, the proposal of a laboratory floor ethics may help to move beyond the limits of ELSI programmes. However, it would be misleading to view the laboratory as the cradle or birthplace of technological applications that will shape the future of humankind. Rather, they mirror the present view of the future. I will argue that an epistemological analysis of techno-scientific activity is a helpful detour to refocus ethics on the design of objects. Nano-objects will be redefined as carriers of meanings and valuations that need to be made explicit, then articulated and submitted to a moral evaluation.

The ethical turn in science and technology

ELSI research broke with the tradition of applied ethics. Instead of looking at the arsenal of ethical doctrines—ethics of virtues, principlism or consequentialism—in search of the best candidate to apply to the case of nanotechnology, ELSI programmes favour a bottom-up approach. Taking the agenda of nano-initiatives into account, the task is to identify and anticipate the impacts of nanotechnology on society at large. As pointed out by Alfred Nordmann, the ELSI approach also broke with the debates raised around the methods of technology assessment developed in the 1980s, concerning the right moment for a technology to be subjected to social control. In ELSI, the right moment is upstream, before the technology is disseminated or even proved feasible through anticipation of its potential consequences. It is described as a ‘proactive’ rather than merely a reactive attitude for promoting responsible innovation and it is, in fact, shaping the future (Nordmann 2010). Although this approach can be seen as a consequentialist approach to ethics, in practice it is essentially a prospective exercise on the anticipation of potential consequences, risks or conflicts to the values of society as it is now. This prospective approach, already experimented for the development of genomics, calls for social scientists, philosophers, lawyers and economists. Ethics is no longer solely in the hands of professional ethicists. Social scientists have been embarked on the board of research laboratories, not just to observe scientists in action, but also to engage in dialogue and try to trigger reflections about the effects of their research on society. The mission of ELSI researchers is to identify and clearly articulate a number of major issues raised by the development and diffusion of the emerging technology.

The result is the establishment of a list of problems—toxicity and environmental effects, safety and security, privacy, human enhancement, intellectual property and global justice. The list has been adopted and used in national and international reports or public debates on nanotechnology with few nuances. It quickly became a standard checklist, such as the one we use to travel safely. It proved crucial in raising concern among policy-makers, scientists and industrialists, and in engaging them in public debates. To a certain extent it kicked off an attempt towards the co-construction of science, technology and society (European Union High-Level Expert Group, 2004).

The limits of the ELSI approach

The checklist, however, is no more than an early diagnosis of potential upcoming issues. It has nothing to do with normative ethics. A list of problems does not provide clues to their solutions or guidelines for action. And there is a great distance between the realisation of the potential risks raised by nanotechnology and the implementation of legal measures to prevent them. First, ELSI has to be completed by regulations, codes of conduct and guides of good practices, all of which rely on ethics principles and values applied to the field of nanotechnology. More than an ethical guide, the establishment of a checklist of potential issues is a useful tool for risk governance. It looks like a routine prospective exercise in industry or business, and it belongs to the methods of management more than to ethics.

Second, ELSI programmes, as they have been conducted over the last decade, raise inner tensions among the social scientists engaged in them. These programmes were set up in order to address all societal, ethical and legal issues upstream during the earliest stages of research. However, the issues that have been identified and discussed in most publications and conferences are only concerned with applications of nanotechnology research that anticipate the potential future undesirable consequences of their diffusion in society. With this focus on future applications, ELSI programmes relied on the timeline of the nano-initiative roadmap with its four steps: (i) passive nanostructure; (ii) active nanostructures; (iii) systems of nanosystems; and (iv) molecular systems with emerging functions (Roco et al. 2000). Many ethical reflections and debates thus concentrated on nanorobots and enhanced human capacities, and became more and more prospective and speculative. Fascinating futures of autonomous robots, post-humans and immortal life have attracted a lot of public and scholarly attention over the last decade.

Thus, ironically, while ELSI programmes meant to anticipate the potential adverse effects of nanotechnology, they resulted in endorsing and validating incredible futuristic suppositions. As Alfred Nordmann argued, they generated a perverse effect as they transformed the conditional tense following ‘if’ into a present tense describing the current state of affairs:

The true and perfectly legitimate conditional ‘if we ever were in the position to conquer the natural ageing process and become immortal, then we would face the question whether withholding immortality is tantamount to murder’ becomes foreshortened to ‘if you call into question that biomedical research can bring about immortality within some relevant period of time, you are complicit with murder’ – no matter how remote the possibility that such research might succeed, we are morally obliged to support it. (Nordmann 2007; Rip 2009)

This spectacular reversal of the ethical question about research aimed at human enhancement relies on a pre-emption of the future, a potential and improbable future being posed as real. In their prospective effort, ELSI research programmes, in general, tend to assume that our technological future is predetermined and that society has to regulate or modulate its development. This deterministic assumption underlies the management of the consequences of nanotechnology applications. Although it provides a sense of control it boils down to generating social acceptability. Moreover, this sense of control is partially blind to past experiences, which taught us that the future is not always in our hands, and that historical contingencies and complex interactions deeply affect the course of technological changes. Thus, ironically, the concern with the future is divorced from the present, as well as the past.

Third, the focus on futuristic applications of nanotechnology generated an additional perverse effect. Although ELSI research was launched to address issues upstream in a proactive manner, it failed to interest the actors upstream. Prospective exercises do not appeal to researchers at the bench. Laboratory workers tend to think that they are not concerned with issues raised in ELSI research, as long as they are not working on futuristic applications, such as nanorobots or brain implants that will enhance human performances, etc. (Sauvage 2008). They tend to consider ethicists as professional experts in abstract speculations and often call for a division of labour: we are dealing with technical issues, and it is the ethicists’ and politicians’ responsibility to deal with moral and societal issues. Or, when they have been convinced that they should engage in the ethical reflection on their own research agenda, they often consider ethics as a problem-solving activity based on the model of scientific activity. And they expect that an ethics toolkit would help them behave as ‘responsible scientists’.¹

Finally, ELSI programmes are also unsatisfactory for professional ethicists. In most sectors of applied ethics—medical ethics, environmental ethics, neuroethics, etc.—ethicists have the choice to develop a variety of moral theories, such as principlism, consequentialism, ethics of good life or ethics of care. In ELSI programmes ethics seems to be concerned exclusively with consequentialism. More precisely, the anticipatory attitude relies on a managerial translation of consequentialism understood as the balance between the moral acceptability of risks and the desirability of benefits. Ethical deliberation boils down to cost–benefit analysis, a ritual exercise in the conduct of business affairs. Ironically, if ELSI programmes are of interest to professional ethicists it is because the two aforementioned ‘perverse effects’ raise a classical issue of moral philosophy: the issue of unintended effects of actions linked with the notion of ‘moral luck’, which begs for a moral judgement (Williams 1981).

Why ethics on the laboratory floor?

If ELSI programmes are unsatisfactory both for ethicists and for scientists because they are too future-oriented, do we have a better chance of success by focusing on the present, on the actual research presently conducted on the laboratory floor?

In order to raise ethical issues on the laboratory floor, one has to dismiss the traditional linear model with which the process of technology development is frequently represented. This model has its conventional sequence: basic science – applied science – prototype – industrial development – commercial applications. As long as the linear model prevailed there were no reasons why ethicists should play a role in the laboratory. The traditional ethos of science, as defined by Robert Merton and based on the experience of one century of academic research, sufficed to cope with most ethical concerns (Merton 1986). According to Merton, basic science is supposed to be ‘pure’, neutral, amoral, while applications would be good or bad depending on their uses and on the context of use.

If it is taken seriously, the proposition to bring ethicists onto the laboratory floor requires the linear model to be brought into question together with the ‘purification’ of science, which it implies. Introducing ethics onto the laboratory floor presupposes that laboratory research is not shaped exclusively by epistemic values, such as truth, empirical adequacy and objectivity, or simplicity, generality and accuracy (Carrier et al. 2008). Research agendas in nanotechnology are also ruled by social values and driven by great expectations of medical, environmental or practical applications. Research in nanotechnology is by no means a disinterested pursuit of knowledge. Does this mean that researchers on the laboratory floor are committed to non-epistemic values? And to what extent may the participation of non-epistemic values raise ethical concerns?

It is clear that the regime of research, which prevails in nanotechnology—with interdisciplinary teams and large networks, start-ups and industrial contracts—seriously challenges the norms that Robert Merton ascribed to science, such as communalism, universalism, disinterestedness and organised scepticism. When researchers are deeply entangled in industrial ventures, encouraged to patent their results or to keep them secret, other norms are emerging, such as reliability, accountability or reflexivity, which are not specific to the scientific profession (Ziman 1994, 1996).

However, the changing ethos of scientists and their new professional identity is not just a consequence of the practical orientations of research in nanotechnology. In fact, nanotechnology, like a number of technoscientific research areas, combines science and technology in many different ways. Their interplay shapes research agendas, changes the criteria of success and also implies a new definition of what matters in research—performing more than understanding. It also determines what counts as a proof and it brings about a new relation to research objects.

A few words about technoscience in general may be a useful detour to shape the project of ethics on the laboratory floor. Although no laboratory in the world uses the term ‘technoscience’ in its title because it has depreciative connotations, this term can be used as a descriptive category to characterise the epistemology of research in a number of areas, such as genomics, nanotechnology or synthetic biology.²

The term technoscience was coined in the 1980s by the Belgian philosopher Gilbert Hottois to refer to science that is done in a technological setting with high-tech or mathematical instruments, and which is driven by the perspective of practical applications (Hottois 1984). Bruno Latour made extensive use of the term ‘technoscience’ in his effort to fight against the myth of pure science. All sciences and all technologies are hybrids, as science, technology and politics cannot be separated from one another (Latour 1987). The term ‘technoscience’ does not just mean that science and technology cannot be held apart and that the distinction between pure and applied research is a myth. It also indicates that society and economics are integral parts of the game. Over the past decade, especially with the ‘knowledge economy’ defined by the Lisbon Agenda for the European community, societal concerns have been explicitly integrated as legitimate research goals. Non-epistemic values, such as competitiveness, commercial profit, sustainability and social justice, are considered to be fully legitimate goals of research agendas, in particular in nanotechnology and synthetic bio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Enhancing Ethical Reflection in the Laboratory: How Soft Impacts Require Tough Thinking
• Part I: Moral Philosophers in the Laboratory
• Part II: Case Studies
• Part III: Critical Perspectives
• Index