ABSTRACT
Once it was agreed that advancing technology has confronted humankind with a new world situation—magnifying social impacts, making us interdependent, and giving rise to unintended consequences as well as accelerating changes of great scale—an important question inevitably arose: Can traditional ethics cope with the new and unprecedented problems of modern industrial society, or are revolutionary new ethical approaches necessary? That, indeed, was the basic question of the symposium: Will older ethical traditions suffice to deal with the great changes in our contemporary technological world, providing a frame of reference and guide to action in a world so markedly different from that in which these traditional ethical concepts were first enunciated? Or will an entirely new ethics have to be brought into play in order to provide guidance for the "brave new world" created by technology?
