Disputes about the desirability of promoting or forestalling new technologies invariably provoke debate about the need for regulation and the legitimacy of attempts to regulate and govern technological innovation. These debates are ultimately concerned with understanding and attempting to manage the threats, risks and uncertainty produced by, and associated with, the emergence of scientific breakthroughs and new technologies and their applications (‘technological risk’). Although technological risk is typically associated with tangible harms understood in terms of harms to health and the environment, emerging technologies may also threaten cultural, political and moral norms and values. Because assessments of both merits and dangers of such technologies are contextual, and their future trajectory fraught with uncertainty, such assessments are unstable and contested. Hence attempts to identify, understand and quantify these risks in order to devise a legitimate and effective legal and regulatory framework for “managing” raises acute challenges. These challenges are explored in this module at two levels.
First, we examine disputes about the benefits and dangers of technological innovation, recognizing that these portrayals are deeply embedded in contested narratives of ‘progress’ and ‘growth’, ‘innovation’ and ‘development’ – in the past as in the present. This module will examine how both the imagined benefits and threats associated with technological innovation are understood, within a range of discourses, but focusing particularly on how they are conventionally framed in policy discourse within specific contexts and contingent on a wide range of variables.
Secondly, it draws attention to contestation about the desirability and need to regulate emerging technology at all and, even if there is widespread agreement about the need to regulate an emerging technology (or a specific set of technological applications), both identifying the appropriate governing norms, and identifying how to regulate legitimately and effectively, are likely to confront considerable challenges. This module will critically examine justification for regulation (understood primarily but not exclusively in terms of ‘risk management’) and how attempts have been made to ‘manage risks’ associated with particular technological developments. In so doing, we will acquire a deeper understanding of the strengths and shortcomings of various approaches, tools and understandings of the appropriate role of law and regulatory instruments more generally in managing technological risk. Because there are inevitable trade-offs between competing norms and values in the governance of technological innovations and applications, this course will highlight the need for democratic participation and deliberation, at least in liberal democratic states, in order to lay claim to legitimacy. This module provides students with an opportunity to explore attempts to regulate new and emerging technologies that feature in contemporary debates, with a view to critically interrogating whether, and to what extent, common themes and concerns can be discerned with a view to sketching the contours of an analytical framework that can illuminate both the challenges of regulating technology and which might also serve to provide normative guidance. In so doing students should thus acquire a richer and more sophisticated understanding of the implications of technological innovation for democracy, the rule of law, human rights, human dignity, distributive justice, social solidarity and human flourishing.
Learning Outcomes
By the end of the module students should be able to:
Demonstrate understanding of and critically examine the contested and socially constructed nature of ‘technological risk’ and the nature of ‘science’ and scientific inquiry;
critically examine the way in which legal and other institutions involved in the larger enterprise of governing emerging technologies have developed to grapple with the perceived social, political, regulatory and ethical challenges posed by scientific inquiry and technological innovation;
investigate how the legal and other norms that addresses technological risk must be understood as a constantly evolving combination of legal as well as indirect, social and market-based forms of regulation and governance that together constitute a complex field of ‘risk management’;
reflect critically on how these regulatory institutions and processes concerned with managing risk are related to various theoretical investigations into the nature and different types of technological risk as well as the political, economic and moral questions raised by it;
recognize and explore how technological developments are deeply embedded in contested narratives of ‘progress’ and ‘growth’ which themselves are sites of contestation within countries as well as between the so-called ‘Global North’ and ‘Global South’;
to explore some of the newly emerging spaces and contexts in which technological risk is unfolding with reference to specific sites of emergence and contestation concerning their implications and acceptability, to understand the importance of democratic participation and deliberation in these assessments, and the challenges associated with seeking to institutionalise and ensure that meaningful democratic participation occurs;
Understand and apply a set of conceptual tools and analytical frameworks through which they can reflect critically on questions concerned with the social acceptability of novel technological applications, including the role of human rights as moral ‘boundary objects’ and their alleged universality in a global context characterized by contrasting political and constitutional commitments and cultures;
Critically reflect upon the ‘stakes’ – legal, ethical, moral, political, social and economic – in contemporary debates about ‘technological risk’, including the nature of the perceived risks, the level at which emerging regulatory responses are no longer confined to a single jurisdiction, and the involvement of multiple and varied actors, organisations and institutions (often in co-operation with state institutions) in contributing to the development and implementation of regulatory responses that operate in both the local, regional, transnational and global domains;
Undertake an in-depth interrogation of the regulation of a specific set or suite of new or emerging technologies (which may change from year to year depending on interest and salience particular technological developments) by undertaking sustained independent in-depth research and analysis by writing a 6000 word essay.
Assessment
35171-01 : Essay : Coursework (100%)
Assessment Methods & Exceptions
Assessment: 6000 word essay.
Reassessment: Students who submit an essay which does not obtain the pass mark will be provided with an opportunity to revise their essay in light of feedback in order to bring it up to the level of a pass. In these circumstances, the student’s final mark for this module cannot exceed the basic threshold for a pass.
