关键词: 纳米技术, 机械隐喻, 背景依赖, 伦理导向

Abstract: With its heuristic power of control, nanotechnology is considered as a potential field of ethical inquiry. This requires that the normative analysis of nanoethics is from the technological assessment of artifacts and social consequences to the vision one of metaphor, imagination and language, which promote us to suggest that Drexler's nanomachine popular in public sphere is from mechanistic metaphor, leading to the deterministic destiny of one-dimension society. In contrary, the opponent Smalley makes the biomimesis metaphor as a paradigmatic transformation, providing some opportunities for man to express moral responsibility in shaping nanotechnology. So the consciousness development of ethics-oriented nanotechnology is to consider it as the context-dependent field of many disciplines, directing the objective and subjective elements involved in meaning-making towards humanism as to make constructing nanotechnology for the nourishment and support of humanity.

Key words: Nanotechnology, Machine Metaphor, Context Dependence, Ethical Orientation