Bridging the Gap between Social Acceptance and Ethical Acceptability
Bridging the Gap between Social Acceptance and Ethical Acceptability
复制标题
弥合社会接受度和道德接受度之间的差距
作者：
B. Taebi
新技术带来了巨大的好处，但也可能带来新的重大风险。在政策制定中评估这些风险时，人们倾向于关注社会接受度。然而，如果仅仅关注社会接受度，我们可能会忽视技术风险的重要伦理方面，特别是当我们评估具有跨国和代际风险的技术时。我认为，对风险技术的良好治理需要分析社会接受度和道德接受度。从概念上讲，这两个概念在很大程度上是互补的。社会接受度研究无法充分捕捉风险技术的所有道德相关特征；伦理分析通常不包括利益相关者的意见，因此缺乏相关的经验输入，无法进行彻底的伦理评估。这两种类型的分析只有在结合起来进行时，才与风险技术的国家和国际治理相关。我讨论罗尔斯的广泛反思均衡作为一种结合社会接受和伦理接受的方法。虽然我的论点的基本原理是广泛适用的，但我将特别审查多国核废料储存库的情况。这个例子将表明，如果我们只关注社会接受度，伦理问题可能会被忽视，并将提供一个测试案例，证明广泛的反思平衡如何有助于弥合众所周知的接受度-可接受度差距。
New technology brings great benefits, but it can also create new and significant risks. When evaluating those risks in policymaking, there is a tendency to focus on social acceptance. By solely focusing on social acceptance, we could, however, overlook important ethical aspects of technological risk, particularly when we evaluate technologies with transnational and intergenerational risks. I argue that good governance of risky technology requires analyzing both social acceptance and ethical acceptability. Conceptually, these two notions are mostly complementary. Social acceptance studies are not capable of sufficiently capturing all the morally relevant features of risky technologies; ethical analyses do not typically include stakeholders’ opinions, and they therefore lack the relevant empirical input for a thorough ethical evaluation. Only when carried out in conjunction are these two types of analysis relevant to national and international governance of risky technology. I discuss the Rawlsian wide reflective equilibrium as a method for marrying social acceptance and ethical acceptability. Although the rationale of my argument is broadly applicable, I will examine the case of multinational nuclear waste repositories in particular. This example will show how ethical issues may be overlooked if we focus only on social acceptance, and will provide a test case for demonstrating how the wide reflective equilibrium can help to bridge the proverbial acceptance‐acceptability gap.