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Delft University of Technology Seeding Moral Responsibility in Ownership How to Deal with Uncertain Risks of GMOs Robaey, Zoe DOI 10.4233/uuid:c4b2c0ce-fe42-47c4-9103-c124c05bfcad Publication date 2017 Document Version Final published version Citation (APA) Robaey, Z. (2017). Seeding Moral Responsibility in Ownership: How to Deal with Uncertain Risks of GMOs. https://doi.org/10.4233/uuid:c4b2c0ce-fe42-47c4-9103-c124c05bfcad Important note To cite this publication, please use the final published version (if applicable). Please check the document version above. Copyright Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons. Takedown policy Please contact us and provide details if you believe this document breaches copyrights. We will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. This work is downloaded from Delft University of Technology. For technical reasons the number of authors shown on this cover page is limited to a maximum of 10. Seeding Moral Responsibility in Ownership How to Deal with Uncertain Risks of GMOs Seeding Moral Responsibility in Ownership How to Deal with Uncertain Risks of GMOs Proefschrift ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Technische Universiteit Delft, op gezag van de Rector Magnificus prof.ir. K.C.A.M. Luyben voorzitter van het College voor Promoties, in het openbaar te verdedigen op donderdag 19 januari 2017 om 15:00 uur door Zoë Houda ROBAEY Master of Arts in European Studies on Society, Science and Technology, Universiteit Maastricht, Maastricht, Nederland Master of Public Policy, Hertie School of Governance, Berlijn, Duitsland geboren te PARIJS (Frankrijk) This dissertation has been approved by the promotors: Prof.dr. I.R. van de Poel Composition of the doctoral committee: Rector Magnificus Chairman Prof.dr. I.R. van de Poel Technische Universiteit Delft, promotor Independent members: Prof.dr. M.J. de Vries Technische Universiteit Delft Prof.dr. S.O. Hansson KTH Royal Institute of Technology Prof.dr. P.M. Macnaghten Wageningen University and Research dr. H. van den Belt Wageningen University and Research dr. D. Stemerding Rathenau Instituut Other member: dr. J. Nihlén Fahlquist Uppsala Universitet Research for this thesis was made possible by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) under grant number 016.114.625. © Robaey, 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission in writing of the publisher. editors: Philip Brey, Peter Kroes and Anthonie Meijers ISBN: 978-90-386-4205-5 ISSN: 1574-941X Copies of this publication may be ordered from the 4TU.Centre for Ethics and Technology, [email protected]. for more information, see http://www.ethcisandtechnology.eu. Contents Acknowledgements ix 1 Introduction 1 1.1. GMO OMG! 1 1.2. Why do we need an ethics of technology account for GM seeds? 3 1.3. Moral responsibility in the social experiment with GM seeds 6 1.4. Owning GM seeds and their uncertain risks 10 1.5. Research questions and approach 13 1.6. Overview of Chapters 14 2 Looking for Moral Responsibility in Ownership: A Way to Deal with Hazards of GMOs 19 2.1. A Constructive Proposal 19 2.2. GMOs, Hazards and Ownership 21 2.3. Ownership and Moral Responsibility 25 2.4. When Does Moral Responsibility for Owners of Genetically Modified Seeds End? 29 2.5. Conclusion 32 3 Gone with the Wind: Conceiving of Moral Responsibility in the Case of GMO Contamination 35 3.1. Introduction 35 3.2. Knowledge, Ignorance and Responsibility 36 3.3. Current Proposals to Ascribe Moral Responsibility for Contamination of GMOs 39 3.4. The Problem of Contamination 40 3.5. Contamination and Ownership 42 3.6. Solutions to Contamination: What GMOs can Learn from Nuclear Energy Technologies 44 3.7. Owners as Social Experimenters: Some Practical Recommendations 47 3.8. Taking Responsibility Under Uncertainty 51 3.9. Conclusion 53 4 Transferring Moral Responsibility for Technological Hazards: The Case of GMOs in Agriculture 55 4.1. Seeds of Discontent 55 4.2. Ownership Entails Moral Responsibility 56 4.3. The Materialization of Ownership 59 4.4. Transferring Moral Responsibility for Technology 61 4.5. Insights from an Existing Case 71 4.6. Conclusion 76 v 5 The Food Warden: an Exploration of Issues in distributing Responsibilities for Safe-by-Design Synthetic Biology Applications 79 5.1. Introduction 79 5.2. Risk and Safety in Synthetic Biology Applications 80 5.3. Design and Moral Responsibility 81 5.4. Case: the Food Warden 84 5.5. Methods 85 5.6. Results 88 5.7. Discussion 93 5.8. Conclusion 103 6 Conclusion 105 6.1. Main findings 105 6.2. Possible objections and complications of the research 109 6.3. Generalisations 113 6.4. Further Investigations and Practical Implications 114 References 119 Summary 129 Samenvatting 133 Curriculum Vitae 137 List of Publications 139 vi To my family Sonia, Philippe, and Alexandre Acknowledgements Before starting my thesis, I was told by many that it was a very lonely endeavor. In the past years, my experience has been just the opposite. When I think of my years during the PhD, I think of all the people I have met, and that I am thankful for. I feel incredibly lucky and thankful that I had Ibo van de Poel as my promo- tor and that I was able to be part of his group for his VICI grant. Ibo, thank you for being such a great promotor, always engaging and reacting quickly to my questions, providing constructive comments, and helping me explore the questions I wanted to explore. I am also thankful to have met two people who are not only my paranymphs and colleagues, but also have become some of my closest and dearest friends, Shannon Spruit and Jan Bergen. Shannon, thank you for having been my partner in crime in so many things the past years, I really hope we can continue doing many things together in the future. Jan, thank you for the comics on our office’s glass wall, for the juke-box sessions without ends, and for your support in deciphering many things the past years. By the same token, I want to thank Philip Serracino Inglott, who was my friend and my colleague, and who left us suddenly. Philip, I miss you every day. Thank you for the intense arguing sessions, the good laughs, and for being a great friend. Many of my colleagues the past years have shared a lot with me, have helped me and inspired me in ways that I can’t possibly elaborate on in these lines. Thank you, Behnam, Peter, Neelke, Lotte, Donna, Udo, Filippo, Luca, Sofia, Phil, Taylor, Georgy, Christine, Pieter, Cristian, David, Sabine, Maarten, Michael. Also, I would like to thank Janine Drevijn for helping me out with all the of- ficial part of getting a PhD, and for our time working together for the TPM graduate school. A special thanks should go to Diana Droog, who has helped me through administrative procedures since before I even started at TU Delft. I was also lucky to have mentors in the past years. Tineke Ruijgh-van der Ploeg, thank you for helping me gain a deeper understanding of how to trick myself into finishing my thesis. Jessica Nihlèn Fahlquist thank you for making me gain confidence that I too could be a philosopher. Sven Ove Hansson thank you for our few but candid discussions that each time inspired me to be a better scholar. ix I was also very lucky to meet great and inspiring scholars through the 3TU, now 4TU. I am particularly thankful for the fantastic time I had a the writing week that Shannon and Marjolein organized and where I had the opportunity to get to know the Alfanos, Agata, Olya, Melis, David, Marjolein, a little better. In the course of my PhD, I learned to enjoy doing ethical enquiry. However, my desire to go beyond enquiry and do work with impact became true thanks to at least two collaborations that were really exceptional in terms of quality and outputs. I would like to start by mentioning the project that Shannon and I initiated: the Impact! Competition. We wanted to teach ethics to engineers differently, and we did. Ibo supported our plan, and Annick Spoelstra, Linda Ammerlaan and Marion Vredeling helped us make it happen. Through Impact! we helped students express their ethical concerns about their practice through the produc- tion of an art piece. We had two successful exhibitions at the Prinsenhof and at the TU Delft Library. The other project was initiated thanks to Julie Tham and Emmie Heeren on how we could use the work of our research group to reflect on the concept of Safe-by-Design in synthetic biology. You can read all about in Chapter 5 of this book. This leads me to another set of acknowledgements I would like to make, which is to my colleagues at the Rathenau Instituut. I am thankful for the mentorship of Dirk Stemerding in my first months there and for the trust and support of Melanie, Rinie, Geert, Virgil, Ira, Lisa, Catherine, Els, Barend and Hetty. Finishing a thesis, while starting a full time job in Dutch was probably one of the most challenging periods of my life. Doing a PhD is consuming, and at the same time life goes on outside the PhD, and events can all too easily affect the work of the doctoral candidate.