On the Assembly of Things

A recent article in The New Atlantis by its editor, Adam Keiper comes as close as anyone has to publicly diagnosing the strange state of affairs around nanotechnology research in social science. The article makes a number of points that have been made in various places, though not quite all together: that “nanoethicists” can’t agree on what nanotechnology is (as if the scientists could!); that the “low-hanging fruit” of environmental health and safety has dominated all the research; that academics are self-obsessed and self pitying at the same time(?); and that nanoethicists can’t keep their facts and their values straight. All told, it’s a bit of strange article, in that it’s main point seems to be that academic nanoethics has no clue, and should learn something from academic bioethics before it can become a real *ethics. But by the same token, it seems to suffer from any real sense of what social scientists and human scientists are actually doing in this area, and why some of them might cringe at being lumped together under the label of *ethics. Indeed, it doesn’t appear that Keiper questions at all the need for a proper ethics of x,y or z– only that it be a proper ethics.

There is, however, something intellectually curious (interesting? worth researching perhaps?) in the contemporary demand that research in the social sciences and humanities should take the form (if not the content) of ethics. Certainly ethics in the way it is used here has very little of the connotation of philosophy, and much more the sense of responsibility. Social science and humanities work is thus expected to pass judgment on the responsible (or not) development of science and technology and not to contribute directly to what might be considered basic research in ethics. Of course, to the extent that social scientists and humanists are willing to subject themselves to this, to put themselves in the degraded position of the technician of the responsible, there may be little hope for something like a “basic” social science or humanities work on the subject of nanotechnology, and on this note, the Keiper article makes a very important point: do social scientists and humanists–even those who are proper ethicists–really know the facts of the matter in nanotechnology?

Keiper’s critique, which I am fully in agreement with, is that there is way too much leeway granted to the most far-out promises of nanotechnology: space elevators and nanobots and human enhancement and gray goo, when there are in fact plenty of good, current and troubling ethical issues hard at work in the trenches of current nanotechnology. The boondoggle of Drexlerian nanoscience is that it so easily allows people to stay at the level of college textbook science, rather than diving into the difficulties of real science–a problem and an insight I think science studies has been making for several decades now, but not all of its practitioners seem to remember.

This “are you really paying attention to the science” critique is one that could also be pointed at the bioethicists who spend their time debating the finer points of stem cells as if there had never been a human cell in culture before, and as if the promises of disease-curing and life-enhancement were simply true, just not yet. In the case of nanotechnology, it is all too easy to focus on the promises, because the realities are all too often ethically trivial: what ethical difference does it make that my washing machine claims to eliminate bacteria with tiny silver particles, or that my shirt repels water with NanoTex coating?

Of course, these same questions make it clear why all the action is in the area of safety–environmental and biological implications of nano. Sure these aren’t the only issues– but they are currently the most troubling, and the ones that scientists and engineers are most likely to spend their time thinking about. Ironically, in fact, it appears that these kinds of issues have in fact been successfully rendered scientific, even basic science (especially here at my home institution, with CBEN)–and not just “implications.” If that’s the case, does it mean that the social scientists and humanists should breath a sigh of relief and move on to the really ethical issues? I think not. The more routine the pursuit of safety and greenicity becomes in the day to day practice of nanoscience, the more ethically (and politically) fraught it becomes. The more detailed our knowledge is about the nature of toxicity and exposure, the more detailed our plans for treating water, soil, food and air with nano, the more complex our ecological future becomes. Is this the place for ethics? If not, why not? It seems to me that the same critique that we should be looking to the facts of nanotechnology, is the same reason why we should redouble the concern with understanding research and development in the area of safety and environmental consequence. I doubt very much that an issue like “social justice” will disappear the closer you get to these questions.

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