Sophia Knopf, Nina Frahm, and Sebastian Pfotenhauer provide a thought-provoking exploration of the ethical considerations and implications that emerge within the context of direct-to-consumer (DTC) neurotechnology start-ups. The authors investigate how these companies approach and enact ethical considerations, particularly focusing on boundary-work and the strategic use of ethics to establish credibility, legitimacy, and autonomy in an unsettled and contested field. Through a series of interviews and qualitative analysis, the paper uncovers the various ways in which neurotechnology start-ups mobilize ethics to navigate the complex terrain between visionary promises and potential ethical hazards and risks.
The study highlights four dimensions of boundary-work that DTC neurotechnology start-ups engage in: actual vs. hypothetical issues, good vs. bad purposes and consequences, consumer safety vs. medical risk or harm, and sound science vs. overpromising. The authors suggest that ethics functions as a mediator, facilitating the articulation of visions of successful technologies and desirable futures. By framing ethics through boundary-work, the start-ups strategically defer certain ethical challenges to the future while delegating ethical reasoning to established knowledge regimes.
The authors propose that such framing of ethics allows the start-ups to construct desirable technology trajectories from the present into the future, establishing credibility and legitimacy in the field. In essence, the paper argues that ethics becomes a key ingredient in nascent knowledge-control regimes where the power to shape a specific understanding of ethics allocates rights and responsibilities, legitimizing certain visions of desirable socio-technical futures and neuro-innovation practices.
Relating this research to broader philosophical issues, we can observe that the questions raised in the paper touch upon the nature of ethics and responsibility in technological innovation. This resonates with wider discussions in philosophy regarding the ethics of emerging technologies, the role of expertise, and the co-construction of socio-technical futures. The paper illuminates the complex relationship between ethical considerations, stakeholder interests, and the shaping of technology and society, which has been a longstanding concern in philosophy of technology and science and technology studies.
The paper offers numerous potential avenues for further research and investigation. Future studies could explore how these ethical strategies and boundary-work practices compare to those employed in other emerging technology sectors. Another promising area of inquiry would be the examination of the potential effects of evolving regulatory frameworks and public discourse on the ethical practices of start-ups in DTC neurotechnology and beyond. Such research would further our understanding of the dynamic interplay between ethics, technology, and society in shaping our collective future.
Abstract
Like many ethics debates surrounding emerging technologies, neuroethics is increasingly concerned with the private sector. Here, entrepreneurial visions and claims of how neurotechnology innovation will revolutionize society—from brain-computer-interfaces to neural enhancement and cognitive phenotyping—are confronted with public and policy concerns about the risks and ethical challenges related to such innovations. But while neuroethics frameworks have a longer track record in public sector research such as the U.S. BRAIN Initiative, much less is known about how businesses—and especially start-ups—address ethics in tech development. In this paper, we investigate how actors in the field frame and enact ethics as part of their innovative R&D processes and business models. Drawing on an empirical case study on direct-to-consumer (DTC) neurotechnology start-ups, we find that actors engage in careful boundary-work to anticipate and address public critique of their technologies, which allows them to delineate a manageable scope of their ethics integration. In particular, boundaries are drawn around four areas: the technology’s actual capability, purpose, safety and evidence-base. By drawing such lines of demarcation, we suggest that start-ups make their visions of ethical neurotechnology in society more acceptable, plausible and desirable, favoring their innovations while at the same time assigning discrete responsibilities for ethics. These visions establish a link from the present into the future, mobilizing the latter as promissory place where a technology’s benefits will materialize and to which certain ethical issues can be deferred. In turn, the present is constructed as a moment in which ethical engagement could be delegated to permissive regulatory standards and scientific authority. Our empirical tracing of the construction of ‘ethical realities’ in and by start-ups offers new inroads for ethics research and governance in tech industries beyond neurotechnology.
How Neurotech Start-Ups Envision Ethical Futures: Demarcation, Deferral, Delegation