Techno-moral change through solar geoengineering: How geoengineering challenges sustainability

Abstract

This article brings a new perspective to the ethical debate on geoengineering through stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), incorporating the emerging techno-moral change scholarship into the discussion surrounding sustainability. The techno-moral change approach can help us understand different ways in which technology might shape society. First, it helps highlight how values and norms are interrelated. Second, it shows that techno-moral change can happen even if the technology is in no way realized. Through the introduction of two techno-moral vignettes, two diametrically opposed ways in which SAI forces us to rethink sustainability and our relationship with nature are suggested. SAI could lead to a situation of entrenchment, wherein sustainability as a norm is undermined, or transformation where the necessity of acting according to sustainability is highlighted.

Who owns NATURE? Conceptual appropriation in discourses on climate and biotechnologies

“…But apart from its ethical relevance, we submit that the phenomenon is also of general philosophical interest, as it sheds light on mechanisms of conceptual disruption (Hopster and Löhr, 2023; Löhr 2023) and on the mediating role of concepts in processes of technomoral change (e.g. Hofbauer, 2022).…”

Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies

“…This entails accounting for different, often opposing, regional, cultural, and individual values as well as the values of future generations. Normative uncertainties could also arise as a result of evolving technologies or evolving moral norms (and values) in the future, which could pose new and unanticipated ethical challenges; this is referred to as techno-moral change (Swierstra et al, 2009) and it is very relevant for contemplating the future of climate engineering technologies (Hofbauer, 2022). An inherent source of epistemic uncertainty is the methodological framework of climate science.…”