Michiel Korthals

Ethics in technological culture: a programmatic proposal for a pragmatist approach.

Neither traditional philosophy nor current applied ethics seem able to cope adequately with the highly dynamic character of our modern technological culture. This is because they have insufficient insight into the moral significance of technological artifacts and systems. Here, much can be learned from recent science and technology studies (STS). They have opened up the black box of technological developments and have revealed the intimate intertwinement of technology and society in minute detail. However, while applied ethics is characterized by a certain “technology blindness,” the most influential approaches within STS show a “normative deficit” and display an agnostic or even antagonistic attitude toward ethics. To repair the blind spots of both applied ethics and STS,the authors sketch the contours of a pragmatist approach. They will explore the tasks and tools of a pragmatist ethics and pay special attention to the exploration of future worlds disclosed and shaped by technology and the management of deep value conflicts inherent to a pluralist society.

Pragmatist Ethics for a Technological Culture

Our technological culture has an extremely dynamic character: old ways of reproducing ourselves, managing nature and keeping animals are continually replaced by new ones; norms and values with respect to our bodies, food production, health care and environmental protection are regularly being put up for discussion. This constantly confronts us with new moral problems and dilemmas. In discussion with other approaches this book argues that pragmatism, with its strong emphasis on the interaction between technology and values, gives us both procedural help and stresses the importance of living and cooperating together in tackling these problems and dilemmas. The issues in this book include the interaction of technology and ethics, the status of pragmatism, the concept of practice, and discourse ethics and deliberative democracy. It has an interactive design, with original contributions alternating with critical comments. The book is of interest for students, scholars and policymakers in the fields of bioethics, animal ethics, environmental ethics, pragmatist philosophy and science and technology studies.

Ethical Traceability and Informed Food Choice

Introduction The traceability of food and feed emerged as a focus for political attention and regulation at both national and international governmental levels at the turn of the millennium. The industrialization of food production and manufacture, and the complexities and anonymity of modern supply chains have been accompanied by a new wave of concerns around the safety and quality of the food supply. The emergent concept of keeping track of food products and their different ingredients through the various stages from field to plate offers a potential means of managing some of the recent safety and quality concerns around food. Food traceability covers a range of overlapping objectives, which are outlined below, and so has a wide potential appeal, to regulators, producers, processors, retailers and consumers alike. In this first chapter, we seek to establish the range of ethical concerns around food, drawing from an emerging canon of work on food ethics, and to look at the ways in which the concept of ethical traceability can enhance the public good of existing traceability systems. Traceability relates to where and how foods are produced. It follows that it has the potential to be developed as a tool for providing information to consumers that addresses their concerns about food production.. As traceability retells the history of a food, it can address the ethical, as well as the practical and physical, aspects of that history, enabling more informed food choice. The importance of ethical traceability for consumers is essentially twofold: firstly, it can help them make informed food choices; and secondly, it can act as a (democratizing) means for enabling food consumers to participate more fully as citizens in the shaping of the contemporary food supply. And ethical traceability has a third benefit, this time for food producers, who can use it as a tool for managing the ethical aspects of their own production practices and communicating ethical values about their food products. In the next sections, the nature of food traceability and its differing but overlapping objectives are explained, and the role of ethical traceability is elaborated.

The good life: living for health and a life without risks? On a prominent script of nutrigenomics.

Like all scientific innovations, nutrigenomics develops through a constant interplay with society. Normative assumptions, embedded in the way researchers formulate strands of nutrigenomics research, affect this interplay. These assumptions may influence norms and values on food and health in our society. To discuss the possible pros and cons of a society with nutrigenomics, we need to reflect ethically on assumptions rooted in nutrigenomics research. To begin with, we analysed a set of scientific journal articles and explicated three normative assumptions embedded in the present nutrigenomics research. First, values regarding food are exclusively explained in terms of disease prevention. Health is therefore a state preceding a sum of possible diseases. Second, it is assumed that health should be explained as an interaction between food and genes. Health is minimised to quantifiable health risks and disease prevention through food-gene interactions. The third assumption is that disease prevention by minimisation of risks is in the hands of the individual and that personal risks, revealed either through tests or belonging to a risk group, will play a large role in disease prevention. Together, these assumptions suggest that the good life (a life worth living, with the means to flourish and thrive) is equated with a healthy life. Our thesis is that these three normative assumptions of nutrigenomics may strengthen the concerns related to healthism, health anxiety, time frames and individual responsibilities for health. We reflect on these ethical issues by confronting them in a thought experiment with alternative, philosophical, views of the good life.

Pig towers and in vitro meat: Disclosing moral worlds by design

Technology development is often considered to obfuscate democratic decision-making and is met with ethical suspicion. However, new technologies also can open up issues for societal debate and generate fresh moral engagements. This paper discusses two technological projects: schemes for pig farming in high-rise agro-production parks that came to be known as ‘pig towers’, and efforts to develop techniques for producing meat without animals by using stem cells, labelled ‘in vitro meat’. Even before fully entering our world as actually realized systems or commercially viable products, these technologies disclosed societal concerns over animal agriculture. These concerns were expressed through active public responses and were informed by formal methods of assessment, such as applied ethics and lifecycle analysis. By closely examining how features of these designs entered public debates and ethical thought, we trace the moral world-disclosing character of technological projects. We find that these proposals generate occasions for debate and gather new societal actors to form new coalitions or rifts. Both technologies gave rise to particular understandings of societal issues. As the central means through which problems were discussed changed, new types of arguments were considered relevant and ontological shifts could even be seen to occur with what was considered ‘real meat’ and the ‘true nature’ of animal farming. We argue that world disclosing involves a renewed sense of the character of political and moral agency, whereby the sensibilities that constitute a moral subject are redefined. Finally, we explore the inner tensions and ambiguities of this process of moral and political change by confronting the notions of ‘world disclosure’ developed by Dewey and Heidegger, thereby connecting to recent debates within both STS and political theory on how to understand political processes in a technological culture.

Ethics in a technological culture

The Communist Manifesto (1848) could be read as a preamble to our present technological culture. In it, Marx and Engels conclude, with scarcely concealed admiration, that during its short period of domination, the bourgeoisie has brought together productive forces on a vaster, more massive scale than all of the previous generations combined. As a result, society has taken on an extremely dynamic character. “All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind” (Marx and Engels, 1969). Elsewhere, in The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), Marx summarized his view of the relationship between technology and society concisely with the following words: “The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist” (Marx, 1982: 109).

Ethics for life scientists

Introduction: Ethical challenges for the life sciences.- Researchers in Organizations.- Moral complexity in organizations.- Comments on Jeurissen: Organization and moral complexity.- The social role of businesses and the role of the professional.- Comments on Wempe: Conditions for ethical business.- Responsible Authorship and Communication.- The responsible conduct of research, including responsible authorship and publication practices.- Comments on Bulger: The responsible conduct of research, including responsible authorship and publication practices.- Professional ethics and scholarly communication.- Comments on Zwart: Professional ethics and scholarly communication.- Some recent challenges to openness and freedom in scientific publication.- Comments on Resnik: Some recent challenges to openness and freedom in scientific publication.- Ethics of Animal Research.- Research ethics for animal biotechnology.- Comments on Thompson: Research ethics for animal biotechnology.- Ethics for Life Scientists as a Challenge for Ethics.- How common morality relates to business and the professions.- Comments on Gert: Gerts common morality: old-fashioned or untimely?.- Research as a challenge for ethical reflection.- Comments on Duwell: Research as a challenge for ethical reflection.- Scientists in Society.- New public responsibilities for life scientists.- Comments on Korthals: New public responsibilities for life scientists.- Science, context and professional ethics.- Bioscientists as ethical decision-makers.- Comments on Hayry: Assessing bioscientific work from a moral point of view.- New Developments.- The human genome: common resource but not common heritage.- Conclusions.- Conclusions: Towards ethically sound life sciences.

Coevolution of nutrigenomics and society: ethical considerations

To optimize the coevolution of nutrigenomics and society (ie, the reciprocal stimulation of both developments), I analyzed chances for a fruitful match between normative concepts and strategies of both developments. Nutrigenomics embodies ≥ 3 normative concepts. First, food is exclusively interpreted in terms of disease prevention. Second, striving for health is interpreted as the quantification of risks and prevention of diseases through positive food-gene interactions. The third normative idea is that disease prevention by the minimization of risks is an individuals task. My thesis was that these concepts of nutrigenomics would not easily match with concepts of food and health of various food styles in Western societies, which, for instance, parents in the case of metabolic programming endorse and with a philosophical view of the relation between food, health, and the meaning of life. Next, I reflected on the nonsynchronized coevolution of nutrigenomics and society because of this mismatch and introduced the concept of the fair representation of food styles in nutrigenomic developments. To synchronize and optimize the coevolution of nutrigenomics and society, I propose that the research policy of nutrigenomics should change to a research partnership with society on the basis of fair representation.

Conclusions and Policy Options

Ethical traceability was defined in the first chapter as ‘the ability to trace and map ethical aspects of the food chain by means of recorded identifications’. Traceability is currently mainly used for a range of sometimes overlapping purposes, notably for the management of food safety and public health recall, control and verification, supply chain management and for assurance schemes around food quality and provenance. Only in the latter cases is traceability communicated to consumers; these cases therefore constitute an exception to the general intention of EU Food Law and Codex Alimentarius, which do not consider it appropriate to extend the principle of traceability as far as consumers (as shown in Chapters 2 and 3). The common idea throughout all the studies presented in this book has been that traceability, as used to map the production history of food products, can also be used to map ethical issues in the food chain that relate to production practices. Equally important from the outset was the question of how ethical traceability could be used for enabling informed food choice. By reconstructing or mapping the production history of foods as can be done by means of traceability schemes consumers are empowered to become part of a communicative process concerning food production practices. The analysis in Chapter 4 shows that traceability, i.e. the history of the product, is in fact already used in food advertisements as a commercial communication strategy. In this use of traceability, in advertisements, telling the story of a product ascribes identity to the product, which in turn allows disembedded modern consumers to reconnect with food in a ‘non-superficial’, cultural and ethical manner. The users and beneficiaries of this ethical traceability information about food are primarily consumers. The major ethical concerns of consumers are therefore outlined in Chapter 1. Consumers are substantively concerned about health, animal welfare, the environment, terms of trade, working conditions, etc. Consumers have procedural concerns about the reliability of information, transparency, voice, participation, etc. This analytical distinction is important as it calls our attention to the fact that different measures must be taken in order to address the concerns properly.

Ethical Room for Maneuver: Playground for the Food Business

In a world of glossy corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports, the shallowness of the actual CSR results may well be its counterpart. We claim that the possible gaps between aspirations and implementations are due to the companys overrating abilities to deal with the irrational and complex moral world of business. Many academic approaches aim to lift business ethics up to a higher level by enhancing competences but will fail because they are too rationalistic and generalistic to match the pluralistic and situational practice constituted by the mosaic of values and set of constraints. This is demonstrated by describing and analyzing the CSR development of the multinational caterer Sodexo and in particular its Dutch branch. We explain what they do and why they are not successful. We present a new tool named Ethical Room for Maneuver that centers experiences and concrete situations in a playground of inquiry and experiment to enhance abilities to operate in themoral world and to meliorate business and society with more effectiveness.