The Ethics of Emerging Technology

In one line

The instruments in this module were written between 1947 and 2005, and the technologies that now raise the hardest questions did not exist when they were drafted, so the examinable skill is applying an old framework to a new thing rather than reciting either.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: an emerging technology raises three difficulties for the framework in this module. It may act on people who cannot consent because they do not yet exist; it may reach an interest the instruments never named, such as the contents of a mind; and it may make decisions without a decision-maker, so that no duty-bearer is identifiable. The method for handling all three is in [How a Technology Becomes a Rights Question], and this chapter applies it.

Why the law has this at all

A framework of principles has one advantage over a framework of rules, and it is exactly the advantage this subject needs: a principle applies to a thing its drafters never saw.

Article 6 of the 2005 Declaration requires prior, free, express and informed consent to any preventive, diagnostic and therapeutic medical intervention. Nothing in it depends on knowing what interventions are possible, so it governs a technique invented next year as readily as one invented in 1960. That is why article 26 requires the Declaration to be read as a whole, and why article 11 of the 1997 Declaration prohibits practices which are contrary to human dignity, such as reproductive cloning of human beings: the class is stated, the example is illustrative, and the class can take in members nobody had thought of.

But the advantage has a limit, and the limit is the subject of this chapter. A principle reaches a new technology only if the new technology's harm falls within an interest the framework already recognises. Where it does not, the framework is silent, and the honest answer to an examination question is to say where the silence begins.

Gene editing

What is new. Techniques that make precise, cheap and reliable changes to a genome. Editing a somatic cell changes the person treated. Editing the germ line, an embryo or a gamete, changes every descendant.

What the framework already says. More than students expect, and it is a mistake to say the instruments are silent.

• Article 16 of the 2005 Declaration: the impact of the life sciences on future generations, including on their genetic constitution, is to be given due regard. This is the textual anchor, and it is worked in [The Bioethics Declaration: Society and the Future].
• Article 24 of the 1997 Declaration: the International Bioethics Committee is to give advice on the identification of practices that could be contrary to human dignity, such as germ-line interventions. The example is named.
• Article 11 of the 1997 Declaration: practices contrary to human dignity shall not be permitted, the class being open.
• Article 5 of the 1997 Declaration: research, treatment or diagnosis affecting the genome is to be undertaken only after rigorous prior assessment of the risks and benefits, with prior, free and informed consent, and where a person is unable to consent, only for direct health benefit subject to authorisation and protections. [Research on the Genome and Its Limits] works this.