Philosophers often analyze ethical issues in debates over food and agricultural biotechnology as involving conflicts between different understandings of scientific responsibility. Some views stress prediction of consequences; some, sets of social rules or personal and community virtues that must characterize scientific conduct and government regulation, irrespective of consequences. This tension runs through debates over environmental impact, food safety, animal protection, and social consequences of agricultural biotechnology, as well as in debates over the morality of intellectual property rules and questions about public trust and confidence in science. Yet, many questions remain as to whether philosophical accounts of ethical issues represent actual lay persons' concerns, and whether these accounts have any cross cultural validity. This project will produce a comprehensive philosophical overview of these ethical issues and subject it to scrutiny with respect to its incorporation of lay concerns and its cross cultural relevance. To begin, selective empirical studies of public documents and media representations of the US controversies concerning ethics and food biotechnology will be analyzed and compared with the philosophical accounts. The comparison will assess whether these accounts represent amplified discussions of lay persons' beliefs, if they serve as alternative vocabularies for interpreting issues, or if they are largely irrelevant to lay persons' concerns, (or perhaps some combination of these three possibilities). This assessment uses results from empirical research in the US on moral language in the formation of lay attitudes towards environmental conflicts, and on the role of mass media in affecting public perception of risk. The project also involves developing a collaboration with researchers in The Netherlands that will enable cross cultural comparison of Dutch and other European philosophical accounts and lay persons' views. The debates and philosophical analyses of debates from the US and the Netherlands could then be compared to assess a) whether the debates themselves are consistent with one another, and with the respective philosophical analyses of them; and b) how different cultural approaches to ethical philosophy may themselves create different ways of conceptualizing ethical issues in food and agricultural biotechnology. The research would address this question by placing a North American and a European analysis of biotechnology controversy into philosophical dialogue with one another, and by using the speech and media studies empirical analyses of both to ask questions about the respective roles of philosophy and culture in framing the points of debate. This award helps to support the US research component and several initial meetings and explorations between the US and Netherlands research teams. If progress warrants, a supplement and extension to the award may allow for a workshop in Europe and follow-on research activities.
