Ethics

The goal for any emerging technology is to have it contribute to human flourishing in socially just and environmentally sustainable ways. Given this, the roles of ethics within responsible development of nanotechnology include:

• Elucidating what constitutes justice, human flourishing, and sustainability.



• Identifying opportunities for nanotechnology to contribute to justice, human flourishing, and sustainability, as well as anticipating impediments to its doing so.



• Developing standards for assessing prospective research programs, technologies, and applications, since their social and ethical profiles vary widely. Some may be just, sustainable, and compassionate, while others are reckless, short-sighted, unsustainable, or unnecessary.



• Providing ethical capacity - i.e. tools and resources that assist individuals and organizations to make ethically informed decisions to enable society to adapt effectively to emerging nanotechnologies.



• Identifying limits on how the goal ought to be pursued, since some means are not ethically acceptable, even as their ends are worthwhile.

A comprehensive overview of the social and ethical issues associated with emerging nanotechnologies is available in this Woodrow Wilson Center Project on Emerging Technologies report, Nanotechnology: The Social and Ethical Issues, by NSRG researcher Ronald Sandler.