This is one of the reasons why you have to start talking about governance in these situations. Businesses should have governance strategies. They probably mostly do for finance, or safety, or similar, but they should also have governance strategies in place for ethical/social/cultural impact as well. Things like risk assessment or technology assessment can help here, but they're just part of a wider strategy needed to really nut out all the potential problems and benefits associated with the decision being made.
Of course this is quite tricky, but I think in Europe they're starting to move towards the right idea: they have the precautionary principle, EU commission-funded technical research projects need to follow strict ethical and social governance programs, and the commission is directly funding more research into how to more effectively govern these sorts of endeavours (rather than simply relying on "ethical codes" or "ethics checklists"). It's only a few steps up from that to regulating more widely across Europe (but obviously they need a playground to test in first! and the billion+ euro research Framework Programmes are a pretty good one for that).
I can't really see the US going for this sort of thing though, to be honest, even though it'd most likely prevent things like the BP catastrophe :(
> Of course this is quite tricky, but I think in Europe they're starting to move towards the right idea: they have the precautionary principle
The precautionary principle can't be satisfied. Also, its application is extremely political. For example, it should applied to folks who might become parents.
Note that the precautionary principle is typically invoked by folks who don't don't have much skin in the game and don't understand what their costs and benefits are.
Note that regulation is the best example of systemic risk not to mention the inevitable corruption.
This is not to say that "ethics codes" are good and effective.
Yeah, but you missed the second half of my sentence :) It's not the only thing they do, and it's certainly not the whole of a good governance mechanism. I do agree with you about the PP, but it's a move in the right direction, at least they have awareness of the issues that need to be addressed. There is no silver bullet, but they can (hopefully) work toward something that works most of the time.
On the other hand there is a quote: "Once you have to write your code of ethics down, you have already lost." Unfortunately, I not only don't remember the source, I can't even remember the context.
Of course this is quite tricky, but I think in Europe they're starting to move towards the right idea: they have the precautionary principle, EU commission-funded technical research projects need to follow strict ethical and social governance programs, and the commission is directly funding more research into how to more effectively govern these sorts of endeavours (rather than simply relying on "ethical codes" or "ethics checklists"). It's only a few steps up from that to regulating more widely across Europe (but obviously they need a playground to test in first! and the billion+ euro research Framework Programmes are a pretty good one for that).
I can't really see the US going for this sort of thing though, to be honest, even though it'd most likely prevent things like the BP catastrophe :(