We can govern our technologies by laws, regulations, and other agreements. These changes obviously present some powerful risks, and we should ask ourselves whether we think such changes are worthwhile – because we do have choices in the technologies we make and live by. Likewise with nuclear weapons, we never used to need to ask the question of how we should avoid a civilization-destroying nuclear war because it simply wasn’t possible, but once those weapons were invented, then we did need to ask that question, and answer it, because we were – and still are – at risk for global disaster. Similarly, with communications technologies like social media we are still figuring out how to behave when we have access to so many people and so much information and the recent problems with fake news reflect how quickly things can go wrong on social media if bad actors have access to the public. But with the development of artificial means of maintaining circulation and respiration this became a serious question. There used to be no need for brain death criteria, because we did not have the technological power to even ask the question of whether someone were dead when their brain lost functioning – they would have soon died in any case. While in the past our actions were involuntarily constrained by our weakness, now, with so much technological power, we have to learn how to be voluntarily constrained by our judgment: our ethics.įor example, in the past few decades many new ethical questions have appeared because of innovations in medical, communications, and weapons technologies.

The reason technology ethics is growing in prominence is that new technologies give us more power to act, which means that we have to make choices we didn't have to make before. Technology ethics is the application of ethical thinking to the practical concerns of technology. By Brian Patrick Green, director of Technology Ethics

Ethical reflection definition