Technological ethics in university-industry partnerships: The best of both worlds?

Abstract

Paul Thompson suggests that technological ethics are today better served in the private sector than in the universities. If so, university-industry partnerships could have the result of improving the capacity for university-based science to address ethical issues, if they bring some of the norms and practices that are commonplace in the private sec­tor into the university. Or they could have the result of transferring the relatively weak ethics performance of university science to the private sector. While we can hope for the better outcome, his suspicion is that university-industry partnerships are likely to produce the latter.