Is nanoethics consequentialist?
While virtue ethics is usually used by transhumanists to make their case (wrongly, as we have just seen), consequentialism is the strand of ethics most often used to back up official discourse, though rarely explicitly. Would, then, consequentialism be a good candidate for nanoethics? The main characteristic of consequentialism is that it judges whether an action is morally good or bad in the light of its consequences. It tells us what we should do and how we should decide the best course of action. In its original version, put forward by Hutcheson, consequentialism suggests promoting ‘the greatest good of the greatest number’. So consequentialism, in its broadest sense, evaluates whether an action is morally positive or negative on the basis of its consequences for the largest number of individuals. Many dimensions are generally taken into account when weighing up the predicted or assumed consequences of nanotechnologies. On the one hand, the main risks are to health, the environment,
