Shaping the societal impacts of engineering sciences: a reflection on the role of public funding agencies

There is a growing public policy interest in responsible innovation, which implies an enforcement of interdisciplinary communication between the engineering sciences and the social sciences or humanities anticipating and assessing the societal impacts of engineering research. This article focuses on an innovative brand of ethical technology assessment (TA), which offers (1) an initial interpretive framework for understanding what “societal impacts” are within a good life perspective to ethics and (2) a broad guideline for constituting a realistic conception of the future impacts of a technology that is still under research. Both aspects are employed to formulate ethical recommendations intended to influence the shape of technological products by means of modulating techno-scientific research activities. In this article, attention is drawn to an obstacle faced by this type of TA using a specific case study. In this case, the scientific engineers accepted the reasons offered by this ethical TA as good reasons, ones that were relevant to them, but they decided not to act on them because that would have meant breaking a commitment to the institution subsidizing their research. In this article, it is argued that public research funding agencies concerned with the societal impacts of the technologies resulting from the research they fund should reconsider their role to make it easier for scientific engineers to accommodate recommendations provided by ethical TA, e.g. by creating a feedback loop from the ethicist to the funding agency.