Abstract
New technology brings great benefits, but it can also create new and significant risks. When evaluating those risks in policymaking, there is a tendency to focus on social acceptance. By solely focusing on social acceptance, we could, however, overlook important ethical aspects of technological risk, particularly when we evaluate technologies with transnational and intergenerational risks. I argue that good governance of risky technology requires analyzing both social acceptance and ethical acceptability. Conceptually, these two notions are mostly complementary. Social acceptance studies are not capable of sufficiently capturing all the morally relevant features of risky technologies; ethical analyses do not typically include stakeholders' opinions, and they therefore lack the relevant empirical input for a thorough ethical evaluation. Only when carried out in conjunction are these two types of analysis relevant to national and international governance of risky technology. I discuss the Rawlsian wide reflective equilibrium as a method for marrying social acceptance and ethical acceptability. Although the rationale of my argument is broadly applicable, I will examine the case of multinational nuclear waste repositories in particular. This example will show how ethical issues may be overlooked if we focus only on social acceptance, and will provide a test case for demonstrating how the wide reflective equilibrium can help to bridge the proverbial acceptance-acceptability gap.
Highlights
Introducing new technology into society often brings great benefits, but it can create new and significant risks
I have argued that social acceptance studies do not typically take the ethical issues surrounding risky technology into account (Section 3), ethical acceptability analyses of technological risk are predominantly conceptual and do not include stakeholders’ opinions (Section 4)
Reflecting on the expressed judgment is an inherent part of this method, both reflections from a technical point of view and from a moral point of view. This requires that the person involved in the judgment must have both the ability and the willingness to engage in reflection and, again, this is an assumption that needs empirical substantiation,15 but in general the purpose of the wide reflective equilibrium (WRE) method is to facilitate a reflection and to investigate if the acceptance-acceptability gap can be sufficiently bridged
Summary
Introducing new technology into society often brings great benefits, but it can create new and significant risks. 3) Perhaps the most notable example is probabilistic risk assessment, originally developed in order to systematically understand and reduce the risk of meltdown in nuclear reactors,(2) and to evaluate aviation risks These and other risk assessment methods have been criticized for neglecting social aspects of risk and, overlooking the issue of risk acceptance on the part of the public..
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