Nanotechnology and Societal Impacts: The PFAS Case as a Lens for Contextual Nanoethics

Nanotechnology—understood as the ability to observe, measure, manipulate, and manufacture matter at the nanoscale—represents one of the most transformative domains of contemporary innovation. Its applications span medicine, energy, electronics, and environmental remediation, with the potential to significantly reshape production systems and societal practices. The ethical debate surrounding nanotechnology has traditionally focused on assessing whether specific applications are acceptable, safe, or harmful. While this approach has contributed to identifying key areas of concern—such as environmental risks, human health, privacy, and security—it often presupposes that ethical evaluation can be reduced to determining whether a given technology is “right” or “wrong.” Such a premise is neither universally shared nor analytically sufficient to capture the broader societal transformations associated with emerging technologies. In the nanoethics literature, this type of analysis has been conceptualized as the “in itself” dimension , which focuses on the direct ethical implications of technological artifacts. In contrast, Guillermo Foladori, Noela Invernizzi and Edgar Záyago have proposed a complementary “contextual” dimension , which shifts attention to the socio-economic and institutional systems within which technologies are developed, deployed, and regulated. This distinction highlights the limits of approaches that isolate technologies from the broader structures that shape their impacts. Building on this framework, this paper argues that nanoethics should move beyond the evaluation of isolated applications and instead examine how technologies transform ways of living, producing, governing, and deciding. Nanotechnologies are not merely tools; they actively reconfigure social relations, institutional responsibilities, and economic dynamics. This paper builds on and further develops the distinction proposed by Foladori, Invernizzi and Záyago, extending the analytical scope of the contextual dimension by explicitly linking it to governance structures, economic incentives, and the temporal dynamics of regulation. In doing so, it contributes to reframing nanoethics as a field concerned not only with technological risks, but with the systemic conditions under which such risks emerge and evolve. To illustrate this argument, the paper combines historical analysis with a contemporary case study. First, it revisits the diffusion of electricity and the widespread use of asbestos to show how technological impacts are shaped by social and institutional contexts. It then applies the proposed framework to the case of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), demonstrating how technological risks arise not only from material properties but from governance failures, industrial strategies, and delayed regulatory responses.