During the last decades several tools have been developed to anticipate the future impact of new and emerging technologies. Many of these focus on 'hard,' quantifiable impacts, investigating how novel technologies may affect health, environment and safety. Much less attention is paid to what might be called 'soft' impacts: the way technology influences, for example, the distribution of social roles and responsibilities, moral norms and values, or identities. Several types of technology assessment and of scenario studies can be used to anticipate such soft impacts. We argue, however, that these methods do not recognize the dynamic character of morality and its interaction with technology. As a result, they miss an important opportunity to broaden the scope of social and political deliberation on new and emerging technologies.In this paper we outline a framework for building scenarios that enhance the techno-moral imagination by anticipating how technology, morality and their interaction might evolve. To show what kind of product might result from this framework, a scenario is presented as an exemplar. This scenario focuses on developments in biomedical nanotechnology and the moral regime of experimenting with human beings. Finally, the merits and limitations of our framework and the resulting type of scenarios are discussed.

Technology is a major force in modern societies, co-shaping most of its aspects, including established moral norms and values. Technology Assessment aims to explore the consequences of New and Emerging Science and Technology [NEST] in advance, to help create better technology. This article develops a method for enhancing our moral imagination with regard to future techno-moral change. At the core of this method lies so-called NEST-ethics, the argumentative patterns and tropes that constitute the 'grammar' of ethical discussions about emerging technologies. This grammar can be applied to explore at forehand the moral controversies and even the moral changes that are provoked by these technologies. In the form of alternative techno-moral scenarios these explorations can be used to inform and enhance public deliberation on the desirability of the NEST in question. This results in a type of ethical TA that is self-reflective regarding its own moral standards. To illustrate our method, we offer 'fragments' of a techno-moral scenario on the moral consequences of the introduction of a future ObesityPill. Keywords Techno-moral scenarios • Ethical technology assessmentTechnology has developed into a major force in modern societies, now coshaping most aspects of it. In the words of the American pragmatist John Dewey: 'Steam and electricity have done more to alter the conditions under which men associate together than all the agencies which affected human relationships before our time.' (Dewey, 1954) (p.323) Sometimes technology leads to happy results, sometimes to less happy ones, most often to an ambiguous mix of both. From the standpoint of modern democracy, it is important that those living with the consequences of technology, the citizens, have at least some say in the direction of its further development (Bijker, 2001;Feenberg, 1999;Sclove, 1995). This citizen participation can both be argued for as being of intrinsic value -people have a right to exert democratic influence over the powers that bind them -or in more instrumental terms: mobilizing different points of view leads to better knowledge and thus to

Successful implementation of preconceptional carrier screening for cystic fibrosis and haemoglobinopathies will depend on changes at both regime and landscape level, including the establishment of a new preconceptional health care setting and a clearly visible public health authority which can coordinate, monitor and evaluate such an initiative in public health care.

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Abstract-In this article we introduce the notion of entrenchment to conceptualize the processes in which new technological options, through the interactions between a variety of actors, become viable and established practices in society, both satisfying and modifying needs and interests.