Moving Towards an Ethical Governance of New Emerging Technologies

One of the main problems of a contemporary ethics of technology and of the institutional structures of democratic governance enabling it to be implemented is the lack of an adequate ethics of collective action. More precisely there is a need for a ethics of co-responsibility - as opposed to an ethics of the individual role responsibility - in the field of scientific and technical innovation. Responsibility is not the only ethical stake of a democratic governance of technology, but it is certainly a pivotal concept of contemporary ethics. Furthermore, it opens up over a wide range of reflections and conditions for an ethical governance of technology to be successfully implemented. An ethics of collective co-responsibility requires four significant conceptual shifts: (1) public debate; (2) technology assessment; (3) constitutional change; (4) foresight and knowledge assessment. The EGAIS project will scrutinize some technological projects in several fields in order to assess their options as well as their advancement in terms of public debate, constitutional change, technology and knowledge assessment. This analysis will take us to the definition of concrete guidelines for embedding ethical consideration in projects with technical development.