110. Science, Technology and the Collective Good: When and for Whom is Innovation Beneficial?
Ilaria Galasso, University College Dublin; Susi Geiger, University College Dublin; Alejandra Rosés, Universidad del Salvador, Argentina
Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês, Spanish/Español/Espanhol
Techno-scientific innovations, especially when their development involves (financial or non-financial) public costs, are often discursively supported by the gains they are supposed to provide to the collectivity, be that in form of new or more effective vaccines and therapies, more sustainable or environmentally-friendly technologies, or new (public) services.
Simultaneously, malpractices, private interests, upstream and downstream patterns of exclusion and other hidden externalities may compromise the achievement and equitable distribution of a techno-scientific collective good, especially to the detriment of groups or countries already socio-economically disadvantaged: all too often they exacerbate existing discrimination, marginalization and inequalities.
In this panel we aim to discuss the costs and benefits of techno-scientific innovation and their consequences by critically analyzing the concept of collective good, understood as an overall benefit for a given community as articulated through practices, discourses and negotiations by the concerned actors themselves (Geiger 2021).
We welcome both empirical and conceptual papers from any discipline engaged with the definition, the recuperation and the equitable reconfiguration of the collective good – or of related concepts: public good, common good, social good – in the context of techno-scientific innovation, by engaging with any of the following or other related issues:
Who determines what is ‘good’? Who is excluded from this definitional work?
How is a collective good distributed? Who might become excluded?
Tensions between the collective good and private interests
Collective good and externalities
The role of activism in the pursuit of the collective good
