Risks and Regulation of New Technologies

How should we proceed with advanced research of humanities and social sciences in collaboration? What are the pressing issues of this new trend in a cataclysmic time for civilization? This book, originated with a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Topic-Setting Program, addresses these challenging questions in four parts for innovating twenty-first-century humanities and social sciences. It broadens the horizon for reviewing multi-disciplinary landscapes of risks and regulation of new technologies by focusing on paradigmatic cases from the fields of life and environment. Here, genome editing for reproductive treatment and renewable energy under the constraint of climate change in Japanese and global contexts are involved. The volume comprises a combination of topics and aspects such as public policy and philosophy of science, medicine and law, climate ethics, and the economics of electricity. This edited collection will thus motivate forward-thinking readers across the diverse spectrum of social sciences and humanities to survey themes of their own interests in multi-disciplinary studies. In so doing, they can explore the evolving frontiers of those disciplines and the depths of individual contributions by experts in philosophy, ethics, law, economics, and science, technology, and society (STS), including bioscience.

Tsuyoshi Matsuda 

Tsuyoshi Matsuda is the project leader of ‘Meta-science and Technology Project: Methodology, Ethics and Policy from a Comprehensive Viewpoint’ and a professor of philosophy and environmental ethics in the Graduate School of Humanities, Kobe University, a position he has held since 2003. He received his Ph.D. from Osnabrück University in 1989 as a scholar in the German scientific exchange program, majoring in philosophy and environmental ethics. After working for the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science as a special researcher at Kyoto University, he was with the Kyushu Institute of Design from 1992 to 1997, then joined the faculty of Kobe University in 1997. He was the vice-dean of the Graduate School of Humanities at Kobe University from 2008 to 2010 and the Vice-Dean of the Organization for Advanced and Integrated Research at Kobe University from 2020. He was a visiting researcher at the Leibniz-Archive of the State Library of Niedersachsen (2000, an award of a German scientific exchange scholarship). He is currently a member of the editorial board of the Japanese Leibniz Society and the board of the Kansai Philosophical Association. He also serves as the chief editor of the Journal of Innovative Ethics (Kobe University).   

Jonathan Wolff

Jonathan Wolff is the Alfred Landecker Professor of Values and Public Policy, Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford, Political Philosophy, and a Governing Body Fellow at Wolfson College. He was formerly the Blavatnik Chair in Public Policy at the School, and before that was professor of philosophy and dean of arts and humanities at University College London. He is currently developing a new research programme on revitalising democracy and civil society, in accordance with the aims of the Alfred Landecker Professorship. His other current work largely concerns equality, disadvantage, social justice,and poverty, as well as applied topics such as public safety, disability, gambling, and the regulation of recreational drugs, which he has discussed in his books Ethics and Public Policy: A Philosophical Inquiry (Routledge, 2011) and The Human Right to Health (Norton, 2012). His most recent book is An Introduction to Moral Philosophy (Norton, 2018).

Takashi Yanagawa

Takashi Yanagawa has been a professor at the Graduate School of Economics at Kobe University since 2004 and specializes in industrial organization. He received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1993, where he majored in industrial organization. He worked at Nagoya Gakuin University from 1992 to 1999 and has been a faculty member at Kobe University since 1999. He was the director of the Interfaculty Initiative in the Social Sciences at Kobe University from 2014 to 2016, and the vice-dean of the Organization for Advanced and Integrated Research at Kobe University from 2016 to 2020. He was a visiting researcher at the London School of Economics (1996–1997), the University of California at Berkeley (2004–2005), and the Japan Fair Trade Commission (2008–2011). He was the president of the Japan Economic Policy Association from 2016 to 2019. He is currently a board member of the Japan Economic Policy Association and the Public Utility Economics Association. He is also a co-editor of the International Journal of Economic Policy Studies (Springer).