Technoethics and Public Reason

Abstract

Public reason specifies the rules under which a political community collectively conducts ethical reasoning. Technoethics needs to incorporate an account of how the technologies it aspires to govern bear on these rules. As the case of biobanks shows, technologies have the capacity to change the exact meanings of concepts that play central roles in ethical reasoning. By consequence, a revision of the rules to which this ethical reasoning about the very same biobanks is subject, becomes inevitable. Thus, reasoning in technoethics becomes essentially reflexive, as it is to discuss its own rules at the same level at which it discusses its primary object, namely new technologies. Technoethics is thus not only about how human values are to be incorporated into technology design, but also about what kind of political world is constructed through technology.