Dual-use technologies are technologies that can be used in both beneficial and harmful ways. Some technologies produced through biological engineering (bioengineering) are dual-use. Of all the possible harms from dual-use technologies, global catastrophic risk is a significant concern. Global catastrophic risks (GCRs) are risks of events that could significantly harm or even destroy civilization at the global scale. This paper discusses ethical issues raised by those bioengineered technologies that pose a GCR. The paper also explores how international law can reduce GCR from dual-use bioengineering. The paper was written for a talk of the same title presented at the 7th Annual International Conference on Ethical Issues In Biomedical Engineering.
Ethics of global catastrophic risk. Different ethical views will reach different conclusions about the importance of GCR. Some views consider GCR to be very important; others do not. Certain views could even consider global catastrophe to be a good thing. For example, if the main priority is to reduce suffering, then global catastrophes that kill many people would be good because those people would no longer suffer. But ethical views that let the good in life outweigh the bad generally conclude that global catastrophes are bad. Views that value all people equally consider GCR to be especially bad because global catastrophes involve so many people. Indeed, these egalitarian views often find that reducing the risk of global catastrophe is a top priority for humanity.
Benefits and risks of bioengineering. Bioengineering has already led to major benefits in fields like medicine, leading to breakthroughs like a vaccine for human papillomavirus and gene therapy techniques to treat diseases, and agriculture, where genetically engineered crops increase yields and possess favorable traits such as drought and herbicide resistance. But dual-use bioengineering has also been used to create weapons and other threats. Some bioengineering technologies also have the potential to influence GCR, either by reducing the risk, increasing it, or both. For example, while a genetically engineered virus could help create vaccines to prevent a pandemic, such a virus could also unintentionally escape from the lab. Or, bioterrorists could use the virus as a blueprint to create an extremely deadly biological weapon.
International regulation of GCRs from bioengineering. GCR arising from bioengineering has an inherently international scope. A global catastrophe from bioengineering could impact the entire planet, and bioengineering research and development can be done anywhere in the world. Therefore, international law is an appropriate tool to regulate bioengineering. While some aspects of bioengineering already fall under existing international treaties, these treaties do not sufficiently curtail the GCRs that arise from dual-use bioengineering. One solution is to create a new international legal regime that either regulates bioengineering alone or both bioengineering and other emerging technologies. Other international law options include nonbinding international norms (‘soft law’) and the establishment of an organization dedicated to mitigating GCR from emerging technologies.
Academic citation:
Seth Baum and Grant Wilson, 2013. The ethics of global catastrophic risk from dual-use bioengineering. Ethics in Biology, Engineering and Medicine, vol. 4, no. 1, pages 59-72, DOI 10.1615/EthicsBiologyEngMed.2013007629.
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Image credit: Don McCulley
This blog post was published on 28 July 2020 as part of a website overhaul and backdated to reflect the time of the publication of the work referenced here.
