Nanophilosophy

Nano-Ethics

Nanotechnology has been attracting awareness in practical philosophy and in professional ethics. In the last few years, philosophical-ethical reflection on nanotechnology developed quickly and identified many ethically relevant issues, such as questions of distributional justice, possible risks to human health and the environment, military applications, medical applications, privacy, surveillance and control issues, the human enhancement challenge, and a new perspective on creating artificial life by means of synthetic biology.

Ethics of nanotechnology is still an emerging field in an early stage of development. The speculative nature of some investigations has already been criticized by authors such as Alfred Nordmann. The contribution of philosophy to the issues under consideration, however, differs. While ethics in the European (continental) tradition is mostly regarded as philosophical ethics based on philosophers like Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, Jeremy Bentham, John Rawls, or Jürgen Habermas, the notion of ethics in the American understanding is much broader—and more diffuse. For example, the “anthology” of nanoethics, written by F. Allhoff et al., includes many chapters on the social and political aspects of nanotechnology, but almost none on the subject of ethics in the continental understanding.

Nanoepistemology and Anthropology

The emergence of nanotechnology has raised expectations of a new unity of science. Nanoscience as the science of “Shaping the World Atom by Atom” should, following these expectations, integrate the former classical disciplines of physics, chemistry, biology, and the engineering sciences into a new type of science. Obviously, these projections challenged the philosophy of science and philosophical epistemology in order to uncover the underlying assumptions of those expectations and to question the conditions of their validity. The assumptions could be traced back to a naturalistic understanding of atoms as something similar to bricks or stones in the macroscopic world. “Shaping the World Atom by Atom” would then mean building up new structures from atoms in an analogy relating building systems from macroscopic elements like bricks. Epistemological reasoning questioned the validity of this simple analogy and the “atomic reductionism” behind it.

Nanobiotechnology is emerging at the interface between bio- and nanotechnology. It bridges the gap between inanimate and animate nature, and aims at combining biological modules on the molecular level, as well as producing functional building blocks on a nanoscale with the inclusion of technical materials, interfaces, and bounding surfaces. The point of departure is the fundamental belief of life processes taking place on the nanoscale, because essential building blocks of life have just this size (for example, proteins or DNA). The processes in a cell can be analyzed with nanotechnological methods and be rendered technologically utilizable. In nanobiotechnology, the language of mechanical engineering is applied to describe the mechanisms and parts of cells. Cells and their organelles are interpreted as micro- or nanomachines. Literally speaking, we see a nanotechnological infiltration of molecular biology, genetics and neurophysiology. In this manner, all are integrated under technical points of view. The Nanotechnical (possibly feasible) duplication of fundamental life processes is the essential prerequisite for crossing the borderline between technical and living systems.

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