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A Lay Ethics Quest for Technological Futures: About Tradition, Narrative and Decision-Making

Making better choices about future technologies that are being researched or developed is an important motivator behind lay ethics interventions. However, in practice, they do not always succeed to serve that goal. Especially authors who have noted that lay ethicists sometimes take recourse to well-...

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Autor principal: van der Burg, Simone
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Springer Netherlands 2016
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5161757/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28042347
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11569-016-0273-2
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author van der Burg, Simone
author_facet van der Burg, Simone
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description Making better choices about future technologies that are being researched or developed is an important motivator behind lay ethics interventions. However, in practice, they do not always succeed to serve that goal. Especially authors who have noted that lay ethicists sometimes take recourse to well-known themes which stem from old, even ‘archetypical’ stories, have been criticized for making too little room for agency and decision-making in their approach. This paper aims to contribute to a reflection on how lay ethics can acquire more practical relevance. It will use resources in narrative ethics to suggest that in order to be relevant for action, facilitators of lay ethics interventions need to invite participants to engage in a narrative quest. As part of a quest, lay ethicists should be asked to (1) reflect on a specific question or choice, (2) use diverse (imaginative) input which is informative about the heterogeneity of viewpoints that are defended in society and (3) argue for their standpoints.
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spelling pubmed-51617572016-12-30 A Lay Ethics Quest for Technological Futures: About Tradition, Narrative and Decision-Making van der Burg, Simone Nanoethics Original Paper Making better choices about future technologies that are being researched or developed is an important motivator behind lay ethics interventions. However, in practice, they do not always succeed to serve that goal. Especially authors who have noted that lay ethicists sometimes take recourse to well-known themes which stem from old, even ‘archetypical’ stories, have been criticized for making too little room for agency and decision-making in their approach. This paper aims to contribute to a reflection on how lay ethics can acquire more practical relevance. It will use resources in narrative ethics to suggest that in order to be relevant for action, facilitators of lay ethics interventions need to invite participants to engage in a narrative quest. As part of a quest, lay ethicists should be asked to (1) reflect on a specific question or choice, (2) use diverse (imaginative) input which is informative about the heterogeneity of viewpoints that are defended in society and (3) argue for their standpoints. Springer Netherlands 2016-08-17 2016 /pmc/articles/PMC5161757/ /pubmed/28042347 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11569-016-0273-2 Text en © The Author(s) 2016 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
spellingShingle Original Paper
van der Burg, Simone
A Lay Ethics Quest for Technological Futures: About Tradition, Narrative and Decision-Making
title A Lay Ethics Quest for Technological Futures: About Tradition, Narrative and Decision-Making
title_full A Lay Ethics Quest for Technological Futures: About Tradition, Narrative and Decision-Making
title_fullStr A Lay Ethics Quest for Technological Futures: About Tradition, Narrative and Decision-Making
title_full_unstemmed A Lay Ethics Quest for Technological Futures: About Tradition, Narrative and Decision-Making
title_short A Lay Ethics Quest for Technological Futures: About Tradition, Narrative and Decision-Making
title_sort lay ethics quest for technological futures: about tradition, narrative and decision-making
topic Original Paper
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5161757/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28042347
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11569-016-0273-2
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