The policy relevance of the ethics of technology

The ethics of technology is a field that aims to achieve social impact, among other things, by producing policy-relevant insights. The question of how research findings from this field can be made relevant for the policy domain, however, has not been addressed as of yet. There seems to be an implicitly held starting point that ethics as a discipline produces insights that converge on the ideal of impartiality, and these insights may inform policymakers on how to make certain decisions. Taking account of frameworks on the policy-expertise nexus as developed in the field of policy sciences, this starting point can be said to be relatively naive. The types of knowledge and the types of policy will have an impact on the way science-based findings are most usable. For instance, Pielke (Pielke, 2007) distinguishes four roles that a scientist can assume with regard to policymakers, which may be used by ethicists of technology to structure their advise on policy issues. However, there is a caveat here, like similar frameworks (Hisschemöller & Hoppe, 2001; Jasanoff, 2005), the typology of Pielke assumes that the sciences pertain to descriptive questions, in which he distinguishes between knowledge claims that are either certain or uncertain. All normative questions, however, are delegated to the realm of policy; on these questions, there is either consensus or disagreement. This suggests that ethics, as a field that explicitly targets the issue of normativity, does not fully fit these frameworks. In this paper, I will explore how the ethics of technology can take inspiration from the policy sciences, and I will try to see what its contribution can be with regards to discussions of normativity.