Volume 2, Issue 1

More than a million people are killed on the world's roads annually. Injuries vastly outnumber deaths. The victims are overwhelmingly young and healthy prior to their crashes. This harm flows from many decisions made at many levels, from the individual road user to top government and industry leaders. While the decisions are steeped in a host of ethical questions, the ethical questions are almost universally ignored. This paper raises ethical issues relating to drivers, industry, and government. Increased professional and public focus on the ethical issues surrounding death and injury in traffic has the potential to generate enormous reductions in harm, far larger than those from ongoing safety programs.

The U.S. military has started to construct and deploy robotic weapons systems. Although human controllers may still be monitoring the functioning of the technology, the next logical step is to transfer incrementally more of the decision-making power to the robots themselves. Thus, this article seeks to examine the ethical implications of the creation and use of "autonomous weapons systems."

This paper identifies the unprecedented challenges that the prospects of an `ambient intelligence' era (involving the development of the `internet of things', with wide dissemination of RFID’s, ubiquitous computing, `smart' objects and surveillance devices) raise from the points of view of `privacy' and data protection. Privacy and data protection are identified, in line with Agre's conceptualization, as complementary and interdependent legal instruments aimed at preserving the individual freedom to build one's own personality without excessive constrains and influences, and to control some aspects of one's identity that one projects on the world. The `performativity' and the distribution of agency that characterize AmI systems are exposed as transversal concerns that threaten the fundamental value grounding both privacy and data protection laws: respect for individual autonomy. The relevance, applicability and adequacy of the European privacy and data protection legal frameworks to deal with those unprecedented challenges are then assessed. That assessment required the rethinking of the scope and the normative grounds of what is meant by the `right to privacy.' Privacy, it is argued, is an instrument for fostering the specific yet changing autonomic capabilities of individuals that are, in a given society at a given time, necessary for sustaining a vivid democracy. What those needed capabilities are is obviously contingent both on the characteristics of the constituency considered, and on the state of the technological, economic and social forces that must be weighed against each other through the operation of legislative balancing. Capacity for both reflexive autonomy allowing one to resist social pressures to conform with dominant drifts, and for deliberative abilities allowing one to participate in deliberative processes are arguably among the skills that a vivid democracy needs citizens to have in the circumstances of our times. The value of privacy today, it will be argued, resides in the support it provides for individuals to develop those aptitudes. Acknowledging both the `intermediate' value of privacy, and its `social-structural' value, the paper aims at clarifying the conceptual intricacies characterizing privacy and data protection, in view of the emerging challenges raised by the exponential development of information and communication technologies on the threshold of an `ambient intelligence era.' Finally the applicability of the European data protection scheme to the types of data processing involved in Ambient Intelligence, and the compatibility of the technical visions embedded in those systems with the fundamental data protection principles, are critically explored.

The introduction of IT into health and associated forms of care has changed the nature of risks associated with the use of information. Continuing development is increasing the rate of change. This paper will consider the relationship between policy, ethics and the law within this changing landscape using a risk management approach.The paper considers a 20 year time period from 1990 to 2010 and first maps out the landscape in terms of key shifts in policy. The article seeks to explore how the policy shifts have changed the legal and ethical implications of handling information, by addressing three specific questions:1. Do the policy changes following the 1997 General Election amount to a Kuhnian paradigm shift or simply an evolution?2. How have the legal and ethical implications of handling information been modified by changes in technology, policy and the law?3. How can the concept of opportunity risk help us understand the ethical implications of increased use of IT in health care?The article will conclude by identifying the legal and ethical challenges yet to come as the landscape continues to evolve.

This article investigates the conceptual distinctions between therapy and various forms of human enhancement. It begins by proposing a typology of human enhancements in order to make more rigorous and grounded discussions about the distinction between therapy and enhancement. Three types of human enhancement are proposed: 1) engineering traits of accepted value, 2) engineering traits of contested value and 3) radical transhuman enhancements. Subsequently, the paper explores the distinctions between the ethical justifications that are advanced for therapeutic interventions, comparing them with human enhancements, concluding that the salient characteristic of health-related suffering enables enhancement to gain legitimacy from the perspective of traditional medical ethics. Finally, the paper considers a number of practical obstructions to the realization of radical transhuman enhancements. Specifically, it discusses procedural obstacles to approving experimental medical research for human enhancements, the likely commercialization of human enhancements that would ensue from their development, and the need to develop experimental medical interventions via animal models.

This paper explores the historical idea of improving humanity. Developments in genetics and political thought have during the last century contributed to eugenic policies which have sometimes had adverse effects on people's lives. But European philosophy has seen attempts to make better human beings long before the current scientific advances. The paper explores these attempts by an examination of the doctrines of Plato, Aristotle, Condorcet, Herder, and Mill, as well as the technological Romanticism of Mary Shelley, before moving on to the more recent eugenic policies inspired by Darwin and Galton.

In this paper we examine an increasingly important form of global governance for the field of human embryonic stem cell science; the processes of standardisation. Technical standardisation is essential for any scientific field to develop and is applicable to all stages of knowledge production from the basic science to the market product. However in the case of stem cell science, the apparently neutral processes of standardisation are inextricably entwined with issues of cultural value, particularly around the ethical status of the embryo. This paper examines this tension in two domains of standardisation: basic research (governance of the science) and patenting (governance of the market). In formal governance terms, the two domains appear quite different. Basic research governance in stem cell science is characterised by a high degree of self-regulation by science, albeit with state sponsorship, whereas patenting falls within the legal aegis of international and state bodies. However, in pursuit of standardisation both domains are obliged to wrestle with the politics of the technical-ethical relationship and with the ways that relationship can be organised as a technology of governance. To that extent they form part of a common process of contestation and governance evolution.

The good life: just how good could it be? A vision of the future, from the future.

This paper is a reply to Bostrom's 'Letter from Utopia' published in the same volume.

Biotechnology and the Human Good by C. Ben Mitchell, Edmund D. Pellegrino, Jean Bethke Elshstain, and Scott B. Rae is a thoughtful, carefully argued perspective on the ethics of new developments in biotechnology, such as human enhancement, human germ-line engineering, cloning, nanotechnology, and cybernetics.

After canvassing with good grace the make-up of cyberspace Andrew Murray wonders, in his recent book The Regulation of Cyberspace, which role traditional lawmakers are left to play in the new cyber-regulatory environment. Murray describes the static `command and control' regulatory model as disruptive and ineffective, and supports instead a dynamic, complimentary, and symbiotic regulatory model, which he presents under the features of an autopoietic environment and systems dynamics theory.Regulatory models, explains Andrew Murray in his recent book The Regulation of Cyberspace, intervene when a `disruptive innovation', such as the Internet, creates a regulatory vacuum. As cyberpaternalists suggest, however, the lack of traditional legal-regulatory control systems does not mean total freedom within cyberspace (p.203). On the contrary, as the author contends, `regulators of all forms rush to fill in this vacuum' so that the traditional regulatory mechanism is replaced by private regulatory systems acting, as Joel Reidenberg exposed, as `proxies' to the traditional regulatory system (i.e. courts and law enforcement authorities). Murray shares this point, but also gives credit to the views of cyberlibertarians. Cyberlibertarians argue that traditional command and control models are at last ineffective, even when they operate through proxies. In cyberspace, so they claim, regulators and regulatees mingle with each other to such an unheard-of extent that regulatory interventions cannot be effective unless regulatees co-operate actively.In his book, professor Andrew Murray treasures the sound arguments advanced by the cyberlibertarian and cyberpaternalist camps, and draws lessons from both in order to build a dialectic confrontation between static instrument and dynamic instrument thinking in the regulation of cyberspace. He consecrates the pars destruens of his work to explain why lawmakers should eschew the static approach and adheres to the pars construens to expand on a more dynamic and `smarter' regulatory model.

Nanoethics: The Ethical and Social Dimensions of Nanotechnology, is an anthology of essays on the political, ethical, and societal dimensions of nanoscale science and engineering. The collection explores a wide range of perspectives on the history of nanotechnology, risk issues, policy and public engagement issues, and the challenges of deliberating about and governing new and emerging technologies. Though uneven in quality and sparsely referenced, the collection nonetheless provides a fair and useful introduction to many of the key topics in the field of nanoethics.

When we founded Studies in Ethics, Law and Technology we wondered if we might, like Icarus, be trying to fly too close to the sun. Had we set ourselves an impossible task in seeking to create a new community of interdisciplinary scholars under the umbrella of the words ethics, law and technology? Would expert scholars in biotechnologies, nanotechnologies, neurotechnologies, information technologies, weapons and security technologies, energy and fuel technologies, space based technologies, and/or new media and communication technologies all come together in one place? As we show in this editorial, the answer is yes.