Virtue Ethics and the Social Responsibilities of Researchers
Appeared In: Science, Technology, and Virtues: Contemporary Perspectives
Publication Date: 2021
Notions of personal and professional responsibility are essential to productively tackling thorny ethical issues with technology. While smart regulations, policies, and tools can all help, the foundation for better impacts with technology overall—and particularly novel, emerging technology—lies with innovators equipped with the internal motivation and sound judgment to produce them. But providing training for such responsibility is challenging and complex, both theoretically and practically. This chapter describes a virtue-ethics based training program for scientists and engineers that aimed to frame such responsibilities, embed them into the context of research, and then normalize them as routine and expected components of virtuous professional conduct.
Bourgeois, M. 2021. Virtue Ethics and the Social Responsibilities of Researchers. In Science, Technology, and the Virtues. Edited by: Emanuele Ratti and Thomas Stapleford, Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190081713.003.0014