The Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics

The Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics has ad multiple origins. It was when contributing an article on the philosophy of technology to the pioneering first edition of the Encyclopedia of Bioethics (1978), that I began to dream of a more general encyclopedic introduction to issues of technology and ethics. Inspired by the perspective of scholars as diverse as Jacques Ellul and Hans Jonas, bioethics appeared only part of a comprehensive need to grapple intellectually with the increasingly technological world in which we live. This idea was pursued in a state-of-the-field chapter on ‘‘Philosophy of Technology’’ in A Guide to the Culture of Science, Technology, and Medicine (1980) edited by one of my mentors, Paul T. Durbin. Thus when Stephen G. Post, the editor of the third edition of the Encyclopedia of Bioethics (2004), suggested to Macmillan the idea of a more general ‘‘Encyclopedia of Technoethics,’’ with me as potential editor, I was primed to be enthusiastic— although I also argued that the field should now be expanded to include ethics in relation to both science and technology.