TY - JOUR
T1 - Bridging the Gap between Social Acceptance and Ethical Acceptability
AU - Taebi, Behnam
PY - 2016
Y1 - 2016
N2 - New technology brings great benefits, but it can also create new and significant risks. When evaluating those risks in policymaking, there is a tendency to focus on social acceptance. By solely focusing on social acceptance, we could, however, overlook important ethical aspects of technological risk, particularly when we evaluate technologies with transnational and intergenerational risks. I argue that good governance of risky technology requires analyzing both social acceptance and ethical acceptability. Conceptually, these two notions are mostly complementary. Social acceptance studies are not capable of sufficiently capturing all the morally relevant features of risky technologies; ethical analyses do not typically include stakeholders' opinions, and they therefore lack the relevant empirical input for a thorough ethical evaluation. Only when carried out in conjunction are these two types of analysis relevant to national and international governance of risky technology. I discuss the Rawlsian wide reflective equilibrium as a method for marrying social acceptance and ethical acceptability. Although the rationale of my argument is broadly applicable, I will examine the case of multinational nuclear waste repositories in particular. This example will show how ethical issues may be overlooked if we focus only on social acceptance, and will provide a test case for demonstrating how the wide reflective equilibrium can help to bridge the proverbial acceptance-acceptability gap.
AB - New technology brings great benefits, but it can also create new and significant risks. When evaluating those risks in policymaking, there is a tendency to focus on social acceptance. By solely focusing on social acceptance, we could, however, overlook important ethical aspects of technological risk, particularly when we evaluate technologies with transnational and intergenerational risks. I argue that good governance of risky technology requires analyzing both social acceptance and ethical acceptability. Conceptually, these two notions are mostly complementary. Social acceptance studies are not capable of sufficiently capturing all the morally relevant features of risky technologies; ethical analyses do not typically include stakeholders' opinions, and they therefore lack the relevant empirical input for a thorough ethical evaluation. Only when carried out in conjunction are these two types of analysis relevant to national and international governance of risky technology. I discuss the Rawlsian wide reflective equilibrium as a method for marrying social acceptance and ethical acceptability. Although the rationale of my argument is broadly applicable, I will examine the case of multinational nuclear waste repositories in particular. This example will show how ethical issues may be overlooked if we focus only on social acceptance, and will provide a test case for demonstrating how the wide reflective equilibrium can help to bridge the proverbial acceptance-acceptability gap.
KW - Ethical acceptability
KW - Multinational nuclear waste repository
KW - Reasonable consensus
KW - Social acceptance
KW - Wide reflective equilibrium
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85001874232&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:b2d16e35-7a76-4dd1-b71a-cdd03f9d21de
U2 - 10.1111/risa.12734
DO - 10.1111/risa.12734
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85001874232
SN - 0272-4332
JO - Risk Analysis
JF - Risk Analysis
ER -