Mary Shelley’s 200-year-old fable explores the tension between scientific creativity and social responsibility.

It is a nuanced exploration of scientific ethics and the dynamic between scientific creativity and social responsibility. The novel isn’t a straightforward warning to stop innovating; it is a cautionary tale. The dangers aren’t so much about what we do, but how we go about doing it.

Shelley’s narrative urges us to be good caretakers of the new things we bring into the world, whether they’re ideas or works of art or gadgets or synthetic beings. The novel cautions us that human creativity begets things of great power, and dramatizes what happens when a creator significantly shirks his responsibility.

We’re still grappling with these same issues of creativity and responsibility—even if our scientific knowledge and technological sophistication are far more advanced today than in Shelley’s early 19th century. In an age of obviously Frankensteinian breakthroughs in genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, and social robotics, we’ve already answered the simpler question—we’re being hubristic, in some sense, playing with the forces of life and death. What remains is the deeper lesson at the heart of Frankenstein: That the thrill of discovery is just the beginning of a creator’s work.

In this paper the authors argue that insights from feminist perspectives, particularly in the form of an ethics of care, have a number of advantages when used as a lens through which to consider questions relevant to the governance of emerging technologies.

They highlight how an emphasis on central themes of importance in feminist theory and care ethics such as relationality, contextuality, dependence, power, affect, and narrative can shine a light on a number of salient issues that are typically missed by the dominant and largely consequentialist risk assessment frame.

They argue that the care ethics lens is a better fit when technologies are understood not simply as devices designed to create a certain end experience for a user but as transformative systems that smuggle in numerous social and political interests. The advantages of these care ethics themes for emerging technologies are illustrated through a detailed consideration of agricultural biotechnology. They show how the feminist care ethics lens might have anticipated the very questions that have proved themselves to be the sticking points for this technology.

They therefore suggest that applying a care ethics lens can significantly broaden the frame of appraisal processes used for the governance of emerging technologies and usefully grant legitimacy to questions and concerns that are prominent in public discourse but typically left out of practices of risk assessment.

Charges against critics of genetic engineering (GE) often take four general forms. But all of them, we argue, are unsupported by facts. First, scientific and policy debates are not, as claimed, polarized in black and white, divided simply into two contending camps.

Second, there is no genuine consensus within the scientific community about the safety and acceptability of innovations produced using GE.

Third, allegations of costly overregulation presuppose that there is reliable and complete foreknowledge of benefits as well as any and all possible risks, but such scientific hubris should never be treated as an adequate substitute for systematic investigations.

Fourth, common representations of GE as an incremental, innocuous innovation that poses no special risks and requires no special regulation is inconsistent with the biotechnology corporations’ insistence that GE is a radical innovation that deserves special protection and incentives.

This year, several leading researchers have sounded warnings about the risks of using the CRISPR gene-editing technique to modify human and other species’ genomes in ways that could have “unpredictable effects on future generations” and “profound implications for our relationship to nature”

Concerns are coming from the silicon sector as well. Last year, the physicist Stephen Hawking proclaimed that rapidly advancing artificial intelligence (AI) could destroy the human race. And in 2013, former Royal Society president Martin Rees co-founded the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, UK, in part to study threats from advanced AI.

Leaders of the scientific community are ready to share the responsibility for these powerful technologies with the public. But scientists also want to control the terms of engagement.

The idea that the risks, benefits and ethical challenges of these emerging technologies are something to be decided by experts is wrong-headed, futile and self-defeating. It misunderstands the role of science in public discussions about technological risk. It seriously underestimates the democratic sources of science’s vitality and the capacities of democratic deliberation. And it will further delegitimize and politicize science in modern societies.

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