Emerging biotechnologies: full report - Nuffield Council on Bioethics

E m e r g i n g b i o t e c h n o l o g i e s
of harm mean different things to different people. We nevertheless identify three key values to
qualify the pursuit of benefit and avoidance of harm at a public level (equity, solidarity and
sustainability).
4.57 In setting out an ethical approach we wished to avoid the temptation to propose simply a
supplementary set of ‘decision rules’ that can be applied to a set of available options to select
an ‘ethically preferable’ option. It would not be possible to establish a single set of rules that
would operate consistently for early-stage emerging <strong>biotechnologies</strong> where the applications and
products are speculative, subject to high levels of unpredictability and without clear precedent.
Instead, we have proposed a number of procedural virtues to which we believe the practice of
discursive decision making should aspire (openness, accountability, public reasoning, candour,
enablement and caution). These are intended to open up decisions to ethical reflection and
provide a bulwark against undue concentrations of power within research systems, to render the
exercise of power more transparent and deliberate, and so amenable to professional and
democratic accountability.
4.58 The choice of ethical values and procedural virtues that we advance here is, of course, no less
ambiguous or contested than any other framing, but it has two important virtues. Firstly, in terms
of procedure, it aims to ensure that questions of social and ethical value and conduct are raised
in public discourse and, having been raised, should be pursued alongside questions of
prudential values such as economic return. Secondly, it comprises, in effect, a set of conceptual
tools with which questions of value and conduct may be addressed.
4.59 In discussing the ethics of emerging <strong>biotechnologies</strong> we are aware that we are not the first or
only body – and will undoubtedly not be the last – to do so, either in the particular (synthetic
biology, stem cell research, stratified medicine, etc.) or the more general (emerging technology,
responsible innovation, etc.). The <strong>Nuffield</strong> <strong>Council</strong> on Bioethics has itself produced a number of
earlier <strong>report</strong>s on particular contemporary emerging <strong>biotechnologies</strong>, including
xenotransplantation (1996), genetically modified crops (1999) and biofuels (2011). 296 In
preparing our Report, we have consulted many of these sources, from a number of different
independent, professional and official bodies, national and international organisations, and from
different political, legal and cultural traditions, although there are no doubt more that have
escaped our attention. We have profited greatly and drawn freely from these, but we do not
claim in any way to have synthesised or supplanted them. We do, however, believe that the
approach advanced in this Report, if applied to the governance of biotechnology, will provide a
useful tool to open up and reframe decision making processes in a way that makes them more
ethically robust.
296 Copies of all <strong>Nuffield</strong> <strong>Council</strong> on Bioethics <strong>report</strong>s can be accessed via: http://www.nuffieldbioethics.org/previous-projects.
72