Technology Governance and Ethics

This chapter has three components. First is the discussion of technology governance and its relationship to broader public deliberation upon the ethical impacts of complex socio-technical systems. Second is a discussion of the relationship between the social control of technology through deliberative democratic means, and normative, empirical and applied ethics. Third is an assessment of the concept of ‘ethical tools’—practical decision-support methods or heuristic devices to aid (rather than replace) processes of ethical reflection and judgement without recourse to normative theory. Finally, the potential of VR to act as an ‘ethical tool’ to facilitate judgement is mooted, and a conceptual framework developed in Chap. 4.