Team:Edinburgh/Practices/Morality
Synenergene Collaboration
Once we completed the application scenarios, Dr. Landerweerd instructed us to consider hypothetical situations of an ethical nature, which we may call ‘techno-moral scenarios’. These ethical scenarios are meant to formulate, and attempt to answer, morally loaded questions that may arise if our device were to be implemented in the real world. Furthermore, these technomoral scenarios differ from application scenarios in that they put aside practical concerns - for example, whether our biosensor provides innacurate results - to ask what implications our biosensor would have for society even in its perfect form.
Fortunately, we were one of eight teams selected worldwide for a collaboration with, and grant from, the European Union initiative ‘Synenergene’, whose purpose is to facilitate an open dialogue between synthetic biology, the public and wide variety of stakeholders in order to promote a mutually beneficial understanding of each other’s goals and needs. With their help, we learned to work through hypothetical scenarios in order to construct a theoretical framework for the real-world implementation of our biosensor.
After a series of skypes with the entire Synergene pannell, each team was allocated to a specific supervisor. Our team was assigned to Dr. Laurens Landeweerd, a philosophy assistant professor at Radboud University Nijmegen’s Institute for Science Innovation and Society and researcher at Delft University of Technology (section Biotechnology&Society).
Dr. Landeweerd suggested that we should first consider dilemmas of a practical nature, which we may call ‘application scenarios’. Examples of these include situations where our biosensor provides inaccurate results, or faces legal/manufacturing difficulties. Click on the link below to read our report that details, and provides solutions to, several application scenarios: