Zach Graves and Robert Cook-Deegan rightly call attention to Congress’s need for more technical expertise and for the need to incorporate ethics into the practice of technology assessment (TA)—a historically important vehicle for providing such expertise. Both needs are evident, even if the role that ethics plays in TA, and technical expertise in general, too often goes ignored in policy circles.

The challenges and opportunities posed by technological and scientific developments today are widely discussed, as is, increasingly, Congress’s lack of preparedness to grapple with them. Meanwhile, the social and ethical implications of such developments, in such diverse areas as autonomous vehicles and gene editing, provide ample fodder for popular and academic discourse. All the more surprising, then, is the relative absence of such considerations among TA advocates.

TA has always been understood in at least two distinct ways. First, TA is construed as expert advice—providing lawmakers with technically sound information to inform the policy-making process. Understood in this way, TA need not incorporate ethical considerations.

Second, TA is a means of shoring up democratic control of science and technology. TA arose at a time of increasing awareness of the social and ethical—especially environmental—implications of scientific and technological change. The creation of the Office of Technology Assessment was partly a response to the growing sense that citizens and their representatives—as opposed to executive agencies—must be better positioned to wrestle with the scientific and technological challenges and opportunities facing society. Understood in this way, TA is inherently value-laden, since its purpose is to respond to ethical and even political imperatives.

These two views of TA are not incompatible; after all, consideration of the ethics of science and technology requires expert knowledge. But, taken together, they are incompatible with a “linear” view of expertise, according to which technical knowledge is formulated in a value-free context and then transferred over into the value-laden realm of politics. The historical origins and practice of OTA belie this view.

Graves and Cook-Deegan are right to insist that ethics should play a more prominent role in discussions about—and in the practice of—TA. And they are also right to insist that incorporating ethics, or values generally, need not require abandoning TA’s classical commitment to disinterestedness and nonpartisanship. By bringing value judgments and ethical disagreements more clearly to the fore, TA may facilitate a fairer and more transparent kind of deliberation about scientific and technical problems. In so doing, technology assessment would not be importing an alien practice so much as recognizing the ineliminable role that values play in the formulation of technical expertise.

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