Technoethics: The Dilemma of Doing the Right Moral Thing in Technology Applications

Technoethics relates to the impact of ethics in technology, technological change, and technological advances and their applications. This is true both in established fields such as bioethics or computer ethics or engineering ethics but also in new areas of research such as neuroethics. As pioneering breakthroughs are made in, say, extending life or robotization, novel questions arise regarding the rightness or wrongness of keeping terminal cases alive even at the expense of such trade-offs as making life possible for premature or defective babies in the first case or replacing workers in the second. Some of these agonizing dilemmas are treated in the paper highlighting the ambivalence and difficulty – and corresponding controversy – in reaching ethical decisions in technological applications.