Reforming the Discourses on Innovative Technologies: An Ordonomic Perspective

In the coming decades, the agricultural and food industry will be faced with major challenges: Climate change will make the cultivation of agricultural crops more difficult, for example due to more extreme weather conditions. In addition, the food supply of the steadily growing world population must be secured. And the European Green Deal also contributes to the fact that agriculture is facing a far-reaching transformation, which can only be implemented with innovative, efficient and sustainable technologies and processes.

Some of these technologies, however, are the subject of heated and controversial public debate, which can be observed particularly in the example of green genetic engineering. The reasons for this are mainly moral concerns and conflicts of values, which have still not been effectively addressed in the debate and for which no consensus has therefore been possible so far.

This project develops reform proposals for the public discourse, which should create incentives for a more constructive, solution-oriented debate. This will enable the resolution of conflicting goals while respecting the relevant moral values, under which aspects such as nature conservation and world nutrition fall.

• Prof. Dr. Ingo Pies, Chair of Economic Ethics, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany

• Rentenbank Edmund Rehwinkel-Stiftung