Ethics panel head calls for a 'critical awareness of science'
29 April 1999
[
OSLO] "Ethics in scientific knowledge and technology need to be in the forefront of all decision-making," the first session of Unesco's new World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology was told yesterday.Mrs Vigdís Finnbogadóttir, president of the commission and former president of Iceland, said that many people see science and technology "as a giant that they watch marching blindly forwards, towering over everything, taking control, creating a world so complex that few people understand where its momentum derives from."
What was vital, she said, was that such individuals "should know that such issues are actually being discussed by people who are pondering what is right or wrong about them, how they can either enrich our life our degrade it."
Mrs Finnbogadóttir's remarks were made during the opening ceremony of a three-day meeting, held at the invitation of the Norwegian government, during which the commission - set up last year on the initiative of director-general Federico Mayor - is expected to prepare its contribution to World Conference on Science in Budapest in June.
The meeting also includes a number of roundtable discussions bringing together representatives of international and non-governmental organisations, as well players from the public and private sectors. Roundtable themes are on 'ethics and energy', 'ethics and free water resources', and 'ethics of the information society'.
According to Unesco, these themes reflect COMEST's mandate to serve as "an intellectual forum for the exchange of ideas and experience; to detect on that basis the early signs of risk situations; to fulfil an advisory role for decision-makers; and to promote dialogue between scientific communities, decision-makers and the public."
In her opening remarks to the Oslo meeting, Mrs Finnbógadottir said that while the commission needed to "preserve the memory of the gains of science and technology", it should also "rigorously delineate the challenges of the future, because ethics, quite apart from scientific knowledge and technology capacity, must set the limits between what is possible and what is acceptable."
Ethics, she said, could be simply defined as an attempt to evaluate choices from an essentially human perspective. Energy used in one place, for example, affected the whole world, not just local users - "the reason underlying the need for new ethics to address issues such as global warming".
Similarly a fierce debate was taking place in Iceland on whether the scarce resource of its pure and natural highland landscapes should be sacrificed for hydropower development. "Which is more precious, and how do we quantify such value?" Mrs Finnbogadóttir asked.
Although the use of natural resources such as energy and fresh water affected human survival and aspirations towards material advancement and the quality of life, developments in science and technology made the issues surrounding them more complex by the day.
"But we should not allow scientific specialization, which is a product of the quest for knowledge, to leave those of us who are not scientists feeling disqualified to discuss these issues, since as human beings we are all effected by them, and have a different set of value to contribute towards their development," she said.
Mrs Finnbogadóttir admitted that the ethics commission, which has already published reports on energy and fresh water, had produced "nothing immediately tangible", adding that "we cannot give orders around the world, and would not want to either".
But the important point "is that we are talking about these issues," she said, "making issues of them, striving to establish perspectives on them instead of blindly accepting or rejecting them for better or for worse."
The commission was also in an position to put forward guidelines, and present reasoned and humanistic arguments, that could be incorporated into agreements and policies about how to control the use or misuse of knowledge.
"Furthermore, since new knowledge is by its very nature unpredictable and therefore impossible to control in advance, we need above all to develop a critical frame of mind and a system of values which prepare us to judge each new issues as it evolves," said Mrs Finnbogadóttir.
And she added: "We hope to instil critical awareness not only among those who are affected by the onward march of science, but also among those at the head of the procession."
See also
Doing Science in 'Ethics Time' by Margaret A. Somerville.For full details of the Oslo meeting, click here A further report on the meeting will be posted on these web pages next week.
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Nature © Macmillan Publishers Ltd 1999 Registered No. 785998 England.