Hayes / Maslen Ethics in the Doing of Technoscience

Navigating Professional Frameworks and Organizational Muteness
Erscheinungsjahr 2026
ISBN: 978-3-032-20002-0
Verlag: Springer International Publishing
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: 1 - PDF Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 291 Seiten

Reihe: Social Sciences

This book takes us beneath the banality of business as usual where technoscientific professionals routinely make judgments that impact the lives of others. Be it the safety of engineered systems, the speed and accuracy of medical diagnoses, or the wellbeing of animals subject to genetic modification, mindful, ethical choices contribute to the society we want to live in.

In these decision making moments, professionals working in laboratories, clinics, offices and data centers weigh what constitutes ethical action in the face of ambiguity and uncertainty. This navigation is highly social and messy. The impact may be distant in time and geography and, as our cases show, professionals don’t always get it right. Making ethical choices in a given context is not readily codified, which is a critical observation in the context of escalating trends to automate decision making.

We show how engineers, doctors, nurses, synthetic biologists, and other technoscientific professionals work through conflicting values, complex social organization, and societal expectations, grasping always for a hold on the potentially big consequences of everyday decisions.

Zielgruppe

Research

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hayes, Jan

Maslen, Sarah

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Chapter 1. Introducing professional ethics in practice ( ).- Chapter 2. “Keep as ‘VERY CONFIDENTIAL!!!!’”: How the behavior of technical professionals contributed to the Grenfell Tower disaster ( ).- Chapter 3. The in-visible influence of expert consultants in engineering risk-based decision making ( ).- Chapter 4. Industrial development, invisible haz-ards, and bringing to light their entanglements: Lessons for ethics from the 2014 Kaohsiung propene explosions in Taiwan ( ).- Chapter 5. Technology and micros-copy in biomedical education: navigating the ethical landscape ( ).- Chapter 6. The limits of eth-ical engineering actions: the Titan case ( ).- Chapter 7. What does it take to “settle” a scandal? The ethics of hearing and acting on safety concerns (Dawn Goodwin and Daniel Taylor).- Chapter 8. Divergent attitudes towards ethics and collec-tive responsibility in Canadian engineering discourse ( ).- Chapter 9. Industry and geopolitical tensions: Ethical dilemmas when safety meets security ( ).- Chapter 10. Ethical licensing in practice: the case of CRISPR gene editing technol-ogy ( ).- Chapter 11. The price of safe-ty: The ethics of occupational risk monetization in Brazil ( ).- Chapter 12. AI as an epistemic technology: Navigating ethics in practice in cases of distributed decision making ( ).

Über Autor(innen)

Jan Hayes is a sociologist with 35 years’ experience in safety and risk management. Her research interests are all connected to organizational accident prevention and include professional ethics, expertise, decision making and use of standards.

Sarah Maslen  is a sociologist working on expert decision making in critical contexts, with a particular focus on the cultivation of embodied and other tacit forms of knowledge. She is the author of (Columbia University Press).