A few weeks ago, NewWest.Net sponsored an event featuring the deputy editor of Wired magazine, and during the Q&A someone asked about Wired's coverage of military technology and the ethical implications thereof. The editor, Thomas Goetz, said that Wired considered technology itself to be value-neutral, i.e. neither good nor evil, though how it's used might be a different matter.

That's the position that the Western scientists and engineers have always taken, and it's hard to debate the basic logic. A hammer is just a hammer; it's a person who uses it to hammer nails and build a house, or hammer somebody else down.

On the other hand, some technologies – nuclear fission, genetic engineering – are so powerful that their very existence raises profound ethical and moral issues, and I've never been entirely comfortable with the idea that the human consequences of world-changing innovations will simply take care of themselves.

In fact, we're about to enter some very interesting territory in this regard with the advent of commercial genetic profiling. Three different start-up companies are preparing to offer services in which you spit in a cup and get back an analysis of your DNA. By cross-referencing that data with the fast-growing body of research on genetics, you can learn a lot about your predisposition to certain medical conditions (not to mention your ancestry).

The rub, though, is that proper interpretation of such testing requires quite a lot of expertise – so what is the ethical obligation of the company to guide you through it, rather than simply offer you the data along with a very basic briefing? If you decide to get the testing and find out something potentially significant, what do you tell a sibling who has decided they don't want to know? And will this data really stay out of the hands of health insurance companies, the one group of entities that could clearly make very specific, practical use of it? Should there be a law about that?

The democratic political system is ill-equipped to address these complicated, emotional and fast-changing issues. In the US, the one major political effort to regulate genetic engineering – the Bush Administration's ban on many types of stem-cell research – was driven by a narrow religious agenda having to do with abortion. Reproductive medicine, where the moral and ethical questions really come to a head – is it OK to choose your baby's gender, or eye color? – remains almost entirely unregulated.

It's not that scientists and engineers don't wrestle with these issues; in a current Wired story, the aforementioned Goetz recounts some of the board-level discussions of these questions at one of the personal genetics companies, 23andMe. "There's no lack of caveats and in-context explanations on the [23andMe] site counseling customers to be cautious," he writes. "In fact, the board at times even urged the company to hedge less and embrace the technology's gee-whiz factor, including uncertainty, more decisively."

And I'm hardly one to advocate government dictate over individual choice. Given the opportunity, I personally would love to know as much as I can about my genetic make-up, and make my choices accordingly. On balance, I think technological advances in general – be they aimed at curing disease, or making our lives easier, or protecting the planet – present incredible opportunities for humankind, and indeed are in some ways the very foundation of European Enlightenment thinking, which in turn is the foundation of modern Western society.

That said, I'm still not very comfortable with the idea that the moral and ethical issues presented by new technologies are either non-issues, or ones that should be left strictly to scientists and capitalists. That's particularly the case at a time when rising economic inequality is widening the gap between what's available to the rich and what's available to everyone else. 23andMe will charge $1,000 (£490) for a basic genetic analysis – but a full map of your genome, which will be possible very soon, might cost $250,000. Hereditary wealth may soon have a whole new dimension.

Legislating morality is dangerous territory, for the obvious reasons. But we all have an obligation to take these issues very seriously, and to try to understand the social and political consequences of our inventions. Even the most conscientious companies and researchers, after all, have motivations other than the public good, and can't be expected to be impartial societal arbiters of how technologies are or are not used. That, inconveniently, is the job of the rest of us.

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Jonathan Weber is the founder and editor in chief of NewWest.Net, a regional news service focused on the Rocky Mountain West in the United States. He was previously the co-founder and editor in chief of the Industry Standard

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