ABSTRACT
At various points in the preceding chapters I have demonstrated that ethical judgments — in fact, even determining that normative uncertainties are the starting points of ethical reflection — must rely on knowledge about the consequences of developments and about the future that is uncertain to a greater or lesser extent. This fundamental problem affecting prospective ethical reflection — dealing with uncertain knowledge is a regular feature of the ethics of technology (Section 3.2) — is manifested in some fields of nanotechnology in particularly pointed form, such as in synthetic biology or the “technical enhancement” of humans. In this chapter, I will therefore systematically pursue the dependence of ethics on prospective assumptions and its reliance on epistemological reflection about these assumptions. The starting point is the recent discussion about “speculative nanoethics” (Section 10.1). Critics pointed out first of all the dangers and problems of nanoethics, which would rely too much or even exclusively on speculation about future developments, thus raising suspicions of being arbitrary (Nordmann, 2007a). This criticism has led to differentiated considerations of the relationship between ethical reflection, the knowledge available about the future, and temporal relations (Roache, 2008; Grunwald, 2010a), which I will describe and further develop. The outcome — based on fundamental consideration of the character of knowledge about the future and of its function in decision-making processes
(Section 10.2) — is that speculative elements in fact have a place in reflection on future technologies, but that (a) they must be clarified epistemologically and (b) reflecting on these speculative elements can never be classified as applied ethics. A field of explorative philosophy has rather been opened, which encompasses hermeneutics, anthropology, and epistemology (Section 10.3).1 10.1 The Debate on “Speculative Nanoethics”In the wake of the emergence (Mnyusiwalla et al., 2003) and rapid thematic development of nanoethics (e.g., Khushf, 2004a; Grunwald, 2005), fundamental criticism followed swiftly (Nordmann, 2007a; Keiper, 2007; Nordmann and Rip, 2009). Although this criticism acknowledged that the gap diagnosed at the start of nanoethics had been more or less closed — i.e., the gap between the rapid progress of nanotechnology and hesitant ethical reflection (Mnyusiwalla et al., 2003) — it claimed that a new gap had instead opened in its place. Nanoethics was said to have become much too concerned with speculative developments and to be concerning itself too little with the questions of nanotechnology design and applications that were actually pending: but a new gap has opened up because most nanoethics is too futuristic, focusing on nano-enabled devices that can read our thoughts, for example, at the expense of ongoing incremental
developments that are more ethically significant. (Nordmann and Rip, 2009, p. 273)The DEEPEN project put it into the phrase: “Move away from speculative debate! Return ‘ethical concerns’ to the sphere of politics!” (DEEPEN, 2009, p. 7). If this diagnosis is true, then large parts of nanoethics are misguided and concern themselves with irrelevant and purely speculative ideas, while the really important developments are not taken into consideration. Such fundamental criticism must surely either result in a radical reorientation of nanoethics or be refuted for good reasons. In order to identify this fundamental alternative, in the following four subsections I will first reconstruct and critically analyze the four central arguments raised by the critics of speculative nanoethics. 1 Parts of the argumentation presented in this chapter, in particular Sections 10.1 and 10.4, were initially published in Grunwald (2010a).
