A purely logical proof is offered of a statement that may be surprising to readers of this article in Think, namely the statement that this article has not been published in Think.

Music was important in John Stuart Mill's life. He was an accomplished pianist and a talented improviser. His works include treatments of various philosophical aspects of music, including its metaphysics, its epistemology, the sources and nature of its value, and its aesthetics. Some of his ideas on musical aesthetics are still of interest. This applies to his distinction between those reactions to music that are based on associations with non-musical experiences and those that are based on properties of the music itself. It also applies to his concepts of poetic and oratorical modes of musical expression. In addition to his other achievements, he should be recognized as a philosopher of music.

The meaning of the phrase “equal opportunity” is investigated with a combination of historical text studies and philosophical analysis. In the late nineteenth century, this phrase obtained a specialized meaning that cannot be derived from the meanings of its constituent words. The “equality” of equal opportunity refers to equality among people belonging to different groups, and the “opportunities” mostly concern access to desirable activities and resources that are important for a person’s career and chances in life. Contrary to many other social goals, the ideal of equal opportunity does not have a well-defined endpoint, that is, we cannot describe a plausible social state in which equal opportunity is perfectly satisfied. But in spite of this, equal opportunity has sufficient directional precision to tell us in which direction to go. Strivings for equal opportunity form an essential component of strivings for social justice. A major reason for this is that equal opportunities are incompatible with discrimination, i.e., worse treatment of people because they belong to certain groups. Discrimination is a particularly dangerous form of inequality, since each act of discrimination contributes to perpetuating a pattern that can persist for generations. Working for equal opportunity is an efficient way to counteract discrimination.

This chapter investigates three major perspectives on the multifaceted relationship between ethics and technology assessment. The first perspective is the use of ethical analysis as a tool in technology assessment. A case is made for the importance of including ethics in technology assessment, and three ethical tools are introduced that can be used for that purpose: ethical checklists, ethical matrices and ethical risk analysis. The second perspective is the use of technology assessment as a tool in area-specific (‘applied’) ethics. Unfortunately, ethical analysis of emerging technologies has often been impeded by a focus on unrealistic scenarios with little practical relevance. Ethicists have much to learn from technology assessment with its focus on reasonably plausible future developments. The third perspective is the ethical problems that arise in the performance of technology assessments. Prominent such problems are the choice of topics for technology assessment, conflicts of interest and scientific integrity.