Religion and nanotechnology

Now this story is really weird.  Apparently, most Americans reject the morality of nanotechnology on religious grounds.

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Complete entry

Posted by Nato  on  02/17  at  11:57 PM

First, I'm puzzled by the common position that technology is morally neutral. Applications are moral or immoral; technologies are so-called "neutral".

More recently, though, I've pulled up short of saying that techs are amoral or neutral in this way, because I don't like the possibility that that neutrality could "leak" into consideration of applications or development issues that actually do have moral and ethical relevance.

Instead, I think it bears saying that all applications of techs have moral value one way or the other, which is far from making the technology "neutral", as a technology without applications is useless, and thus, not actually a technology.

If one then takes this path, and concedes that technologies have morally relevant values //based on how they are applied//, then one can see that people responding so easily to such a survey are probably evaluating the morality of modern //applications//,
instead of being puzzled over why people think "neutral" techs have moral value one way or the other.

So Americans tend not to like the way they see nanotechnologies being applied, in contrast to Europeans. Perhaps the justifications are the same, But I would stress that the applications are what make or break any technology in a moral dimension.

Posted by Dan Ray  on  06/20  at  03:25 PM

With a margin of error at only 3 percent, this drastic disparity requires some sort of explanation, Scheufele said.

"We found that people in the U.S. have attitudes about nanotechnology similar to other countries with high levels of religiosity," he said.

Scheufele's survey charted people's relative levels of religious faith and their moral beliefs regarding nanotechnology. It revealed an inverse relationship between a self-assessed importance of God in the respondent's lives and their belief in the moral acceptability of nanotechnology.

Full article: http://nano-ology.blogspot.com/

"More aware people tended to be the ones who possessed less fear of nanotechnology," he said. "But the key to how the public at large will understand nanotechnology has to do with what the first big applications are."

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