How to Shape a Better Future? Epistemic Difficulties for Ethical Assessment and Anticipatory Governance of Emerging Technologies.

Empirical research into the ethics of emerging technologies, often involving foresight studies, technology assessment or application of the precautionary principle, raises significant epistemological challenges by failing to explain the relative epistemic status of contentious normative claims about...

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Publicado en:Ethical Theory & Moral Practice Vol. 18; no. 5; pp. 1027 - 1048
Autores principales: Mittelstadt, Brent, Stahl, Bernd, Fairweather, N.
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Springer Nature Nov2015
Materias:
Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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          Mittelstadt, Brent
          Stahl, Bernd
          Fairweather, N.
        affil:
          University of Oxford, Oxford UK
          De Montfort University, Leicester UK
      su:
        Technological innovations
        Technology assessment
        Anticipatory governance
        Afterlife
        Ethics
        Technological forecasting
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          Technological innovations
          Technology assessment
          Anticipatory governance
          Afterlife
          Ethics
          Technological forecasting
      keyword:
        Emerging technologies
        Empirical ethics
        Epistemology
        Evidence-based policy
        Habermas
      ab: Empirical research into the ethics of emerging technologies, often involving foresight studies, technology assessment or application of the precautionary principle, raises significant epistemological challenges by failing to explain the relative epistemic status of contentious normative claims about future states. This weakness means that it is unclear why the conclusions reached by these approaches should be considered valid, for example in anticipatory ethical assessment or governance of emerging technologies. This paper explains and responds to this problem by proposing an account of how the epistemic status of uncertain normative claims can be established in ethical and political discourses based on Jürgen Habermas' discourse ethics. To better understand the nature of the problem, the relationship between norms, facts and the future is explored in light of potential meta-ethical fallacies faced in the field of empirical ethics. Weaknesses of current approaches to anticipatory ethical assessment and governance are then explored, including the Precautionary Principle and Technology Assessment. We argue that the epistemic status of uncertain normative claims can be understood within Habermas' approach to political discourse, which requires 'translation' of uncertain claims to be comprehensible to other stakeholders in discourse. Translation thus provides a way to allow for uncertain normative claims to be considered alongside other types of validity claims in discourse. The paper contributes a conceptual account of the epistemic status of uncertain normative claims in discourse and begins to develop a 'methodology of translation' which can be further developed for approaches to research and ethical assessment supporting anticipatory evidence-based policy, governance and system design.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype: Article
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    language: English
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