Shaping the societal impacts of engineering sciences: a reflection on the role of public funding agencies

Abstract

There is a growing public policy interest in responsible innovation, which implies an enforcement of interdisciplinary communication between the engineering sciences and the social sciences or humanities anticipating and assessing the societal impacts of engineering research. This article focuses on an innovative brand of ethical technology assessment (TA), which offers (1) an initial interpretive framework for understanding what “societal impacts” are within a good life perspective to ethics and (2) a broad guideline for constituting a realistic conception of the future impacts of a technology that is still under research. Both aspects are employed to formulate ethical recommendations intended to influence the shape of technological products by means of modulating techno-scientific research activities. In this article, attention is drawn to an obstacle faced by this type of TA using a specific case study. In this case, the scientific engineers accepted the reasons offered by this ethical TA as good reasons, ones that were relevant to them, but they decided not to act on them because that would have meant breaking a commitment to the institution subsidizing their research. In this article, it is argued that public research funding agencies concerned with the societal impacts of the technologies resulting from the research they fund should reconsider their role to make it easier for scientific engineers to accommodate recommendations provided by ethical TA, e.g. by creating a feedback loop from the ethicist to the funding agency.

Keywords:

• responsible innovation
• ethical technology assessment
• good life
• photoacoustic mammography
• research funding

Acknowledgements

I want to thank the organization of the SSH Futures Conference for the opportunity to present this paper, and for their involvement in its publication. I thank Tsjalling Swierstra and Adam Briggle for their comments on an earlier draft of this article, and NWO for funding the research that lead to this publication.

Notes

1. For NWO see: http://www.eric-project.nl/nwohome.nsf/pages/NWOA_7E2EZG_Eng; for Federal Science Policy in Flanders see: http://www.belspo.be/belspo/fedra/prog.asp?l=nl&COD=SD. The Royal Academy of Engineers in the UK can be found at: http://www.raeng.org.uk/about/strategy/pdf/strategic_plan.pdf.

2. The types of pulse oximeters checked here were Nellcore, Simed and Critikon.

3. The pulse oximeters tested were Nonin, Masimo and Nellcor instruments in the last study (Feiner et al. 2007). The earlier study tested the Necor N-595 clip-on sensors and for Nonin Onyx and Novametrix 513 (Bickler et al. 2005).