Ethical Assessments of Emerging Technologies ― Appraising the Moral Plausibility of Technological Visions

This book systematically addresses the problem of guaranteeing an epistemological robustness of ethical and social assessments of emerging technologies framing this issue within the current debate about democratic governance of emerging technologies. It also proposes an original approach to deal with this issue of “reliable” ethical evaluation of new technologies. The proposed solution emerges as a combination of theoretical and methodological insights from the fields of Philosophy of Technology, Science and Technology Studies and Technology Assessment and a normative justification based on deliberative democracy theories. The book’s main contribution is to engage a diverse and interdisciplinary audience (ethicists, philosophers, social scientists, technology assessment researchers and practitioners) in a reflection concerning the epistemological challenges that are associated to the endeavour of democratically governing emerging technologies. It brings together concepts and methodologies from different disciplines and shows their synergy in applying them to specific case studies.