Ethics and Epistemology of Nanotechnology - for an object-centred approach

The first part of the "Ethics and epistemology of nanotechnology" dossier [RE 244] highlighted the limits of current approaches to the ethics of nanoscience and nanotechnology (NST), which are ultimately distributed according to the division established by Brice Laurent between ethics-truth (that of Scientific Fact and Moral Value) and ethics-politics in its procedural but also experimental variant. What these approaches have in common is that they perpetuate a metaphysical separation that all philosophy has been trying to challenge since the beginning of the twentieth century: that of subject and object. These ethics take it for granted that only subjects can be subjected to moral evaluation. Objects remain outside the scope of moral philosophy, or are reduced to the status of means. It is true that certain non-human beings have recently entered the field of moral philosophy, where they were previously excluded, and that applied ethics are therefore no longer strictly anthropocentric. We're thinking here of animals and ecosystems, which have given rise to two new branches of applied ethics: animal ethics and environmental ethics. However, technical objects have not suffered the same fate: they have remained excluded from the field of ethics, and only the uses we (i.e., we "subjects") make of our technical objects are supposed to be the subject of ethical reflection. Admittedly, there is an internationally institutionalized ethics of technology, with its diversified approaches, colloquia and journals, but it is still an ethics centered on subjects – whereas we propose to center ethical reflection on the objects themselves. In short, the two main ethical positions adopted with regard to NST accept as self-evident the division between the neutrality of objects and the morality of uses. It is this division that we wish to question here.

Nanotechnologies are therefore pushing us towards a kind of new "Copernican revolution", moving us from a situation in which the subject is the only moral being to one in which objects enter squarely into the field of moral philosophy.

In this article, we'd like to show how the decision to adopt an "epistemology of techniques", i.e.,...