The Ethical Assessment of Technological Change: An overview of the issues

Ethics serves at least two central functions in our lives. We appeal to ethical principles in order to evaluate conduct, states of affairs and social arrangements. And we appeal to ethical norms to guide our conduct and the design and reform of social arrangements. New technologies raise ethical concerns because they both open up dramatically new possibilities for individual and collective action, and because they enable or directly bring about the development of new forms of social organization. By thus expanding our possibilities, technologies force us to consider how existing ethical principles ‘apply’ to these new choices and social forms, and whether new principles will need to be developed to cope with them. Often, the advent of new technologies calls for the creation of new social arrangements to govern them, protect their development, and protect both persons and the natural environment from the risks that they may engender. In developing these arrangements, we are concerned to understand the kinds of ethical principles that should guide in their design. But signiŽcant technological change can also radically alter the effects of already existing social arrangements, such as intellectual property law, environmental law, health care, and national defense in ways that may lead us to question the continued plausibility of these arrangements in their current form. This paper is quite self-consciously written by a non-specialist for non-specialists. Its aim is to provide a brief overview of the kinds of challenges that technological progress creates for ethical understanding. The Žrst section of the paper describes two aspects of technological change that have been of particular interest to philosophers and social theorists: the unpredictability of its effects and its capacity to transform individual and social identities. The second discusses two rather stylized approaches (which I shall call generalist and neutralist, respectively) to addressing these questions. The third section discusses how comprehensive and responsible assessments of technological change must be linked to a well-articulated theory of social justice.