Power and the Ethics of Innovating: Defining Deliberative Injustice for Hermeneutic Technology Assessment

This paper introduces and defends the concept of “deliberative injustice” for hermeneutic technology assessment. Attempts to ethically assess emerging technologies—for example, quantum technologies—often centre on the imagined futures associated with these technologies. Competing sociotechnical “visions” shape public debate and guide decisions about funding, research, and regulation. The paper argues that these visions are not idle speculation or mere prediction, but powerful tools that shape which (and whose) futures are seen as possible, desirable, or legitimate. However, not everyone has equal power to wield these tools. Using David Lewis’s idea of the “conversational score,” the paper shows how imbalances of social power can lead to some voices being ignored or dismissed in the context of societal deliberation about emerging technologies. Those whose voices are ignored or dismissed are wronged not only because they may suffer consequences in the future, but because they are both degraded and damaged in their capacity as deliberative agents in the present. By defining deliberative injustice in terms of whose contributions to public debate receive “uptake” and on what basis, the paper shifts attention away from future outcomes and toward present-day structures of power, offering a new, deontological approach to the ethics of emerging technologies. It illustrates the manifestation of deliberative injustice in current practices of societal deliberation about emerging technologies, with a particular emphasis on quantum technologies. It concludes with a call for ethicists of technology to pay greater attention to deliberative injustice in the future.