To Bind or Not Bind? European Ethics as Soft Law

In the entrenched technoscientific and social developments and orders that have characterized the technological developments in the past decades, the regulatory approaches adopted to think of them, set their pace and stabilize them in different countries have been refined and revised over time. Especially the European Union (EU) provides an excellent research site to study regulatory changes. The growth and integration of the EU parallels the attempts to regulate fields like biotechnology, nanotechnology and synthetic biology. For that reason it offers an excellent opportunity to study how “ethics” has been developed and mobilized as part of the co-production of science and social order.