Paper long abstract:

Nanotechnology, unlike physics or mechanical engineering, is rarely considered to be its own discipline. Some campuses house nanotechnology research within a particular department, while many others have nanotechnology research scattered across departments with varying degrees and mechanisms of interdisciplinary collaboration. What unifies this group of people is that they all found different ways to understand, manipulate and/or create matter at the nanometer scale. In an interdisciplinary collaboration between engineering and ethics PhD-students we map the current state of the nanotechnology community at UC Berkeley. We show that engineers and scientists have very diverse membership in this community, and one may wonder whether we can speak of a nanotechnology community at all, or rather some loosely interlinked collection of faculty. One important function of a community is giving moral guidance, for instance by developing ethical standards and norms. The ad-hoc nature of the nanotechnology community, with its fluid boundaries and indistinct membership, makes this a significant challenge. We evaluate what this means for the attribution of responsibility to these groups. Considering the benefits of membership of this community, e.g. in terms of funding, we argue that it is critical for the community to develop some form of shared understanding of its moral responsibility. It may seem unfair to directly hold engineers responsible for activities in a distant part of the community, considering individuals' limited capacity-to-act. However, there may be an obligation to actively build a nanotechnology community, at least if we want to deal with any emerging issues of nanotechnology responsibly.