ORIGINAL PAPER Discernment and Denial: Nanotechnology Researchers’ Recognition of Ethical Responsibilities Related to Their Work Robert McGinn Received: 16 November 2012 / Accepted: 23 March 2013 # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013 Abstract To what extent do nanotechnology re- searchers discern specific work-related ethical re- sponsibilities that are incumbent upon them? A questionnaire was designed and administered to answer this question. Analysis of responses to 11 ethical responsibility statements (ERSs) by 213 researchers at the Stanford Nanofabrication Facility revealed widespread agreement about a number of work-related ethical responsibilities and substantial divergence in the views about several others. Ex- planations of this divergence are proposed. A new variable is defined that gauges the respondent’s overall level of discernment of the ethical respon- sibilities referenced in the ERSs. The mean dis- cernment level score for respondents who had taken a course that included discussion of ethical issues closely related to science, technology, or engineering was significantly higher than for those who had not. Further, among respondents who had taken such a course, the mean discernment level score for those who had taken an ethics course devoted to exploration of ethical issues closely related to science, technology, or engineering was significantly higher than for those who had taken a technical science or engineer- ing course that typically pays only fleeting attention to such issues. Implications of these findings are discussed. Keywords Discernment . Work-related ethical responsibilities . Ethics module (EM) . Sociodemographic variables . Ethical responsibility statements (ERSs) . Micro-social, meso-social, and macro-social domains or contexts . Fundamental Ethical Responsibilities of Scientists and Engineers (FERSEs) . Nanotechnology researchers’ overall levels of discernment of ethical responsibilities (OLDER) related to their work . Mean OLDER scores Introduction A 1997–2001 survey of about 700 Stanford under- graduate engineering students probed their views on ethical issues in engineering. One noteworthy finding was that only 14.9 % of those who responded affirmed they had learned “anything specific” from their engineering course instructors “about what is involved in being an ethically or socially responsible engineering professional in contemporary society” [1, p. 525]. Mindful of that finding, in 2008, the author elaborated a number of specific work-related ethi- cal responsibilities of nanotechnology researchers Nanoethics DOI 10.1007/s11569-013-0174-6 R. McGinn (*) Department of Management Science and Engineering, School of Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-4026, USA e-mail: mcginn@Stanford.edu