Editors’ Overview: Experiments, Ethics, and New Technologies

Technology has always been a vital component of human development, most often aimed at the advancement of human well-being. However, the introduction of new technologies may also introduce harmful consequences. Indeed, we often do not know beforehand the full spectrum of potential impacts and hazards that these new technologies may bring about. Conventional approaches to risk governance are not directly applicable to these fields due to high levels of uncertainty and ignorance. The inadequacies of these conventional approaches do not, however, warrant categorically rejecting the introduction of new technologies. At the same time, since those uncertain or unknown technological risks and dangers often only materialize after a long time (e.g., asbestos, DDT), there seems to be a need for flexible approaches that are adaptive to new information about the impact of technologies. A broad scholarship has been reflecting on how to deal with new and potentially risky technologies. Within that scholarship, some authors have argued to conceive of new technologies as social experiments and to look for the conditions under which such experiments are morally justified. In this special issue we look at the implications of using this social experiment lens under four overarching themes: philosophical underpinnings of the notion of experiments, the conditions that justify experimentation, the opportunities of experimentation, and how to define agents’ moral responsibility in the social experiment.