Building An Ethical Framework
for the 22 nd Century
With the rapid development of technology in the domains of
artificial intelligence, chemistry and biology, we are confronted
by an increasingly diverse and bewildering range of ethical
dilemmas. Indeed, some of these dilemmas are so novel that all of
our existing notions of what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ will be severely
upturned and may even be judged completely irrelevant when
we attempt to apply them to new scientific knowledge.
Most of us (hopefully) have a well-developed code of individual
ethics which is practical, consistent, and helps to guide us towards
good personal conduct in our daily lives. We would generally
know, for example, how to behave/react if we, as teachers, were
offered a bribe to change a grade in an exam. However, while we
would not need to think about how to respond in this particular
situation, there are a large number of emerging ethical dilemmas
which might leave us confused and uncertain as to what is the
‘right’ course of action to take. To cite just a few of these:
• Is it right to use facial recognition technology to monitor the
public?
• Is it right to geoengineer the planet to offset the threat from
climate change?
• Is it right to create a ‘robot army’ for national defence?
• Is it right to afford robots ‘human’ rights?
• Is it right to edit our future children’s genes (‘designer
babies’)?
• Is it right to bring extinct species back to life (‘de-extinction’)?
even be outraged that we are not permitted to walk in the
street without being monitored for reasons unknown. It is likely
that our objections would be framed in an Orwellian language
of totalitarian surveillance states dragging us down into a
dystopian nightmare… But then we might, after a few minutes’
sober reflection, welcome the prospect of living in a society
where crime, both minor and serious, is (almost) completely
eradicated. What then should be our ethical stance and who is
to guide us?
Another real-world illustration of this is provided by the case of
Chinese biophysicist He Jiankui who was imprisoned in January
2020 having created the world’s first known gene-edited
embryos. This episode gives rise to a number of interesting ethical
questions: Did the researcher know that what he was doing was
‘wrong’? Was it really ‘wrong’ anyway? If so, why exactly was it
‘wrong’? By what ethical standard could we interpret his action
as ‘wrong’? When answering these questions, we can feel the
sand shifting beneath our feet, there is no certainty or solidity in
our responses.
In this year’s edition of ComitTED, we asked our students to act
as latter-day moral philosophers to examine some of the ethical
challenges which will shape their lives and the society in which
they will live. While technology is advancing at a breakneck
speed, the ethical framework needed to guide our attitudes and
behaviour towards scientific developments is lagging behind…
From the Editorial Board
With questions such as these, there is no real precedent,
societal consensus or shared experience to help anchor our
ethical beliefs. Apart from an instinctual ‘gut reaction’, how do
we decide what is the ‘right’ and proper ethical response to a
completely sui generis application of science? We may, for
example, instinctively feel that facial recognition technology
is an unacceptable violation of our right to privacy. We may
All this makes for an especially interesting edition of CommitTED.
Because many of the questions under discussion have not yet
been treated systematically, there is no consensus over what
we should consider to be the ‘correct’ ethical response to these
technologies. As such, all opinions are equally valid and each
deserves serious consideration.