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The Framework for the analysis of nanotechnologies’ impacts and ethical acceptability: Basis of an interdisciplinary approach to assessing novel technologies by Patenaude et al. (2015) (hereafter, “the Framework”), like many approaches that incorporate ethical, legal, and social concerns, was devised within the trend of applied ethics. The proposed tool is rooted in the philosophical tradition, specifically in advances in the study of language in ethics as a normative reference. Though many authors are part of this trend, they don’t necessarily all share the same understanding of the approach. To be sure, though, their various approaches appear to have a common core in their aim to apply a normative reference within a given context, that is, to apply situational ethics (Fletcher 1966).

Approaches will differ, however, according to whether the normative reference is viewed in the light of moral obligations or in that of values. Given differing normative references, the practical reasoning process implemented in applied ethics will carry out differing operations (Legault 2014). Philosophically speaking, the impasses constantly reached in debates on moral arguments prompt us, as Fletcher (1966) does, to view practical reason in a context other than that of the simple application of a moral norm to a given case (Patenaude et al. 2011; Béland et al. 2011; Legault et al. 2013). In the latter applied ethics perspective, practical reason is at work in the decision to act. The ethical dimension is not separate from the decision-making process; rather, it’s integral to it. Thus, it is within the process of deciding to act that it is possible to outline the role of value judgments. While many view value judgments as the expression of an emotion, others, such as Toulmin (1986), have shown that value judgments, although different from judgments of fact, nevertheless constitute a rational activity. In decision-making, judgments of fact and value work together in the determination of the best choice in the context.

The Framework thus goes over the stages of practical reasoning identified above, which operate in decision-making. In the innovation process, the final decision is clearly that of marketing: should someone market or not; and if so, how. To properly support the final decision in innovation, at the outset one must consider all possible impacts (taking the degree of uncertainty into account) on various areas of concern. In regulatory law, the focus is essentially on a product’s components and their toxicity. But innovation cannot be reduced to a product’s components. Any technological device, regardless of its components, is intended for a use, and innovation aims at uses within social practices that will be adopted, which ensures marketing will occur. Thus, the impact analysis for a device must review the impacts of uses on individual, professional, and social practices. These are the impacts covered by ethical, legal, and social concerns about technological development. The impact analysis of a product’s components and its uses yields a map of the situation. This map serves as the basis for the assessment process, so all impacts, positive and negative, are inventoried in it.

The impact analysis provides a set of judgments of fact based on various methods in the natural and social sciences. But the findings that emerge from this analysis are not sufficient to base a decision about marketing on. David Hume distinguished between “is” and “ought”, holding that it is impossible pass from a conclusion about what is to a conclusion about what ought to be (Hume 1955). This distinction still matters in moral philosophy nowadays (Béland and Patenaude 2014), because classical philosophy tends to infer from representations of the human being what that human being ought to do. When applied to the decision-making process, this distinction means it is impossible to reach a conclusion about a value judgment based on a conclusion about facts. Every judgment of the acceptability of a device to be marketed rests on value judgments about the consequences of marketing it. For this reason, the Framework outlines values that recur in the field of technology assessment, so that players can state the value judgments they are making about each of the anticipated consequences. Since a value judgment is a judgment of attribution, the reasons for the attribution must be specified. For example, a value judgment will ascribe, to one degree or another, a heightening in value to a positive health consequence; just as it will ascribe a degree of decreased quality of life to a negative consequence for an individual’s way of life.

Since a technological device will bring in its wake various impacts on several areas of concern, opposing value judgments will arise, some increasing certain values and others diminishing certain values. To reach the final decision, there must be arbitration with respect to the value judgments. The commonly used expression “trade off” suggests a compromise. For this reason, the term “weighting” is preferred here. Faced with opposing value judgments, one must determine to which value judgments to assign a greater weight. In so doing, an order of priority is established among value judgments and consequently among the values that are promoted through innovation. Thus the weighting specifies the final value judgment, which foreshadows a way of life privileged through social practices.

Since the final weighting does no more than assign priority to one value judgment over others that are deemed important, the chosen course of action will aim, first, to incorporate into the device technical functionalities consonant with the value judgments and then to reflect the value judgments in strategies for marketing and implementation through social practices.