Abstract
Using the case of recent concern in Europe and elsewhere over the possible societal and environmental implications of synthetic biology, this chapter examines how claims about the implications of innovative techniques and procedures are typically made. The analysis suggests that claims are characteristically couched in terms of a dualism: what is factually possible and what is ethically desirable. Use of this is/ought dualism serves both to reproduce the division of labour between natural scientific knowledge of what is and ethical knowledge of what should be and to indicate that, between them, science and ethics exhaust all the knowledge that is relevant to the assessment of innovations. The analysis goes on to show that this twofold classification is inadequate and that using this twofold approach has tended to limit the kinds of question about societal and environmental implications that get to be asked officially.
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Notes
- 1.
According to the views of analytic philosophy other forms of knowledge may exist too, such as aesthetics.
- 2.
Though, as Shapin carefully shows, assumptions about certain oughts were required to frame the original context of scientific truth telling in the seventeenth century; see Chapter 3 of his 1994.
- 3.
See the second sheet of the Synbiosafe overview at http://www.synbiosafe.eu/uploads///pdf/Synbiosafe.pdf
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Yearley, S. (2010). Understanding Responses to the Environmental and Ethical Aspects of Innovative Technologies: The Case of Synthetic Biology in Europe. In: Gross, M., Heinrichs, H. (eds) Environmental Sociology. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8730-0_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8730-0_6
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