Asle H. Kiran

Beyond checklists: toward an ethical-constructive technology assessment

While many technology assessments (TAs) formally conducted by TA organizations in Europe and the USA have examined the implications of new technologies for ‘quantifiable risks’ regarding safety, health or the environment, they have largely ignored the ethical implications of those technologies. Recently, ethicists and philosophers have tried to fill this gap by introducing tools for ethical technology assessment (eTA). The predominant approaches in eTA typically rely on a checklist approach, narrowing down the moral assessment of new technologies to evaluating a list of pre-defined ethical issues. In doing so, they often remain external to processes of technology development. In order to connect the ethics of technology more closely with processes of technology development, this paper introduces a set of principles for an ethical-constructive technology assessment approach (eCTA), reflecting on insights developed in the philosophy of technology and Science and Technology Studies, and drawing on examples of telecare technologies. This approach bases itself on an analysis of the implications of technology processes at the micro-level, particularly for human–technology relations. The eCTA approach augments the current approach of the ethics of new and emerging science and technology at the meso- and macro-levels of institutional practices

Scaling values: a perspective from philosophy of technology

Natural foods, a classification that includes organic food and locally produced small scale food, have increasingly come into focus in the last few years. ‘Today, the fastest growing segment of the food market is not fast foods, convenience foods, or inexpensive industrial foods but instead is “natural foods”‘ (Ikerd, 2008). Part of the reason for this is of course that these types of food taste better and more ‘natural’ than their industrially produced counterparts. However, that might not be the sole reason and maybe not even the most important reason for the upsurge in interest in more naturally grown foods. Opposition to industrialised forms of food production is as old as industrialised food itself; alternative ways of growing foods and farming animals have been linked to a spectrum of concerns and values about the earth, human health and animal welfare at least since the 1960s (Ikerd, 2008). In recent years, in the context of global warming and other environmental issues (itself nothing new), the tendency to link natural foods the broader issue of sustainability has become reinforced: ‘the natural food movement is being driven by deeper political, ethical, and philosophical issues than the concerns that have driven the natural food movement of the past’ (Ikerd, 2008). Similarly, in an initiative to increase the production and consumption of organic products by the Norwegian Ministry of Agriculture and Food (LMD, 2009), the focus is on issues other than taste; sustainability, biological diversity, and gaining new knowledge and new techniques that can be transferred to ordinary agriculture are among the reasons the Norwegian ministry cites for prioritising organic food production in the years to come (LMD, 2009: 8f). In other words, besides being ‘good food’, there are a range of political, practical and ethical issues that are associated with natural foods systems that should make both policymakers, producers and consumers avoid industrialised foods.

Mediating patienthood-from an ethics of to an ethics with technology.

The changes that happen to healthcare services after the implementation of new assistive healthcare technologies (also called welfare technology in the Nordic countries) concern more than increased efficiency and reducing healthcare expenditure. Of particular interest from an ethical point of view are the manners in which technologies shape the roles and identities of care receivers and healthcare personnel. The notion of patienthood is explored in this paper as something that is both challenged by new technologies, and as something that is opened up for active and potentially positive reshaping when care receivers support their illness or frailty with assistive healthcare technologies. This dual effect of technologies (as both challenge and opportunity) requires a rethinking of ethics of technologies, which for most part have been preoccupied with ethical issues prior to the implementation of a new technology into a healthcare service. Ethics of technology should also contribute to the concrete efforts of care receivers to establish something approximating a good patienthood in relation to a new technology, making it opportune to dub it, instead, an ethics with technology. This paper explores how assistive healthcare technologies impact on care receivers and the care situation, and in relation to the notion of patienthood, before turning to what this implies for an ethics that has as its goal to support care receivers to reach a life with the technology that is in line with their own notions of well-being and a good life.