The Nanosilver Linings role play case offers participants first-person experience with interpersonal interaction in the context of the wicked problems of emerging technology macroethics. In the fictional scenario, diverse societal stakeholders convene at a town hall meeting to consider whether a nanotechnology-enabled food packaging industry should be offered incentives to establish an operation in their economically struggling Midwestern city. This original creative work was built with a combination of elements, selected for their established pedagogical efficacy and as topical dimensions of (...) the realistic scenario. The product life cycle is used as a framework for integrated consideration of scientific, societal, and ethical issues. The Nanosilver Linings hypothetical case was delivered through the format of the 3-hour workshop Ethics when Biocomplexity meets Human Complexity, providing an immersive, holistic ethics learning experience for STEM graduate students. Through their participation in the Nanosilver Linings case and Ethics when Biocomplexity meets Human Complexity workshop, four cohorts of science and engineering doctoral students reported the achievement of specific learning objectives pertaining to a range of macroethics concepts and professional practices, including stakeholder perspectives, communication, human values, and ethical frameworks. Automated text analysis of workshop transcripts revealed differences in sentiment and in ethical framework preference between societal stakeholder roles. These resources have been recognized as ethics education exemplars by the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. (shrink)

Discussions about the appropriate way of assessing and managing new or emerging technologies—like nanomaterials—expose the problematic relationship between scientific knowledge production and regulatory decision-making. On one hand, there is a strong demand for scientific expertise to support decisions, especially by analyzing risks and hazards when uncertainties are prevalent and society’s stakes are high. On the other hand, science is criticized for its authoritative claim to objectivity and for keeping the inherent uncertainty, ambiguity, and selectivity of scientific observation latent. Requests for (...) more transparency in science can lead to revealing, to risk managers and the public, the indeterminacy in knowledge production processes. This has consequences for the prevalence of scientific knowledge in decision-making, because it increases uncertainty on both sides of the breach between science and decisions: scientists lose confidence regarding the scientifically tested knowledge which they pass on, and risk managers lose confidence regarding their decisions based on this knowledge. Nonetheless, the concept of “probabilistic risk assessment” remains an important heuristic for dealing with potential future events. This paper addresses questions of the function of scientific risk assessment in organized risk management. The main argument in this paper is that knowledge alone no longer functions as a mechanism for absorbing uncertainty. Accordingly, the interaction between science and decisions must enable a temporarily stable commitment to manage new threats like products and applications coming from the field of nanoscience and nanomaterials. (shrink)