Ethical Efficiency: Responsibility and Contingency

By Virgil Cristian Lenoir

Practical and conceptual, the Responsible Research and Innovation set of books contributes to the clarification of this new requirement for all sciences and technological innovation. It covers the multiple and international responsibilities, by using various philosophical resources, mostly discussing the following topics: ethics, contingency, normative economy, freedom, corporate social responsibility (CSR), participative technological evaluation, sustainable development, geoengineering, the precautionary principle, standards, interdisciplinarity, and climate management.

The ethics of efficiency must be considered with regard to the logic of action or to economic, political, legal or scientific systems.

This book presents a question on the central theme of responsible research and innovation (RRI), which has an ethical influence on effective logics. The issue is to question the opportunity and modularities of an ethical effective influence on the logics of efficiency of research and innovation.

From the distinction of efficiency and effectiveness, lies the problem of efficacy, the ethical accord between the two. Thus appears the possibility of taking effective responsibility with respect to systematic injustices potentially linked to this efficiency. This book proposes categories to understand the ethical implications of research and innovation processes, under the aspect of their efficacy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Jan 5, 2016
• ISBN: 9781119268611

Book preview

Preface*

"For Time which gives

When it takes back

To my fathers"

Is it possible, without creating a paradox, to have responsibility for the unpredictable? The exploratory work of responsible research and innovation (RRI) now involves a level of uncertainty which is not accidental but essential with regard to its substantive consequences. In today’s complex and plural world, changing with increasing speed, the prediction of the future effects of a theory or an invention seems to be more and more based on guesswork rather than serious ethical reasoning. Nevertheless, the unprecedented efficiency of our technical devices calls for an unprecedented level of responsibility.

The goal of this book is not to provide a characterization or definition of research, innovation or responsibility. Rather it is to philosophically formulate a question which has a decisive impact on RRI. It aims to examine the possibility and methods of having an ethical influence on the logics of efficiency which are notably used in RRI. If efficiency is currently being upheld by reasoning which is seen through its systematic consequences, how is it possible to establish an ethical influence which is not external (like a wagon with a fifth wheel, or the hidden variables in quantum mechanics) but is an integral part of this reasoning?

This is not a question which arises in relation to the common themes of RRI, though it could even be argued that they are crucially dependent on it. Indeed, highly informed empirical analysis of RRI or attempts to formulate a concept of responsibility that considers their transformations risk becoming abstractions due to their lack of an ethical qualification of efficiency. Exercising responsibility at the level of RRI means, from whichever angle the issue is approached, applying ethical demands to the logic behind them. Therefore, it would seem to be important not to overlook the possibility and methods for such an application to be made.

Speaking of unpredictability, complexity or plurality gives rise to a classic theme of philosophy: contingency. More accurately, philosophy seems to have continuously attempted to ward off, annex or minimize contingency. Nevertheless, it is contingency which refers most precisely to that which resists prediction and upsets the most thoroughly considered forecasts. It is this which becomes problematic when discussing responsibility for the unpredictable. In this preface, we will strive to use contingency, and the various ways of resisting it, as the common thread to establish the structure of the question which we will then examine.

Time gives rise to them and the moment calls for them. The mind keeps watch over forgotten choices. It exhumes them and recalls them with precision, one by one and altogether, in their logic, these choices, to offer them up for our freedom with the weight of their own immanence. These choices, whether intentional or not, more or less partially decided, incited, propensities or accidents, form a heterogeneous group. Here, within the rejected, fought and prohibited, contingency is where this denial, fight and prohibition are decided.

If contingency is, at the same time, an encounter, an unpredictable tangent and a new configuration, that is, the random aspects of a situation, it should be acknowledged that none of us would be here without it, without such accidents. Nevertheless, there is nothing in the world that people fear more and put more energy into controlling. They are aware that at any time they could lose everything they own, find their health devastated and their life destroyed. However, it may be that they suffer more from the resources used to control this contingency than from contingency itself.

The question of controlling contingency1 can be examined through two lines of reasoning. On the one hand is efficiency, the success of human action, in the sense where the finality, as will be demonstrated, is only essential subjectively, but where the logic of the action relies on the result in order for it to become more precise and to be rolled out on a larger scale. On the other hand is ethics, when we aim, so to speak, to predict the unpredictable, the accidents of whose abstract possibility we are aware, but not the circumstances of the possible occurrence: the events which the individual had no possibility, therefore no responsibility, of predicting. (At this stage, we are not talking about justice, since we are referring to accidents which have occurred in a contingent way, thus not only damage caused by other people.)

One of the ways of picturing the relationship between these two topics is to consider that the ethical concern jeopardizes efficiency. The two theories illustrating this vision, which have had the greatest historical influence2, are Chinese legalism and the ultraliberal economic doctrine. In both cases, the involvement of ethical reasoning is rejected as a contingency of arbitrary, irrational and sentimental subjectivity, which only upsets a regulated and efficient order.

For legalists [HAN 10], this efficiency is connected to the power granted to the sovereign, who only needs to move the two levers of reward and punishment to manage the Empire. To do this, the sovereign relies on the eyes of the police and the organization of informants. In such a system, nothing can escape his or her reach. For the sovereign, showing clemency, implementing Confucian virtues of humanity ( chart ren) and justice ( chart yi), would only upset an order which works by itself, thanks to the strength of the law ( chart fa).

For ultraliberal economists, emphasis is placed on a spontaneous order [HAY 07], which is efficient since it does not rely on a predetermined plan overseen by one person. Indeed, this would be tainted by partiality, while the economic process allows the automatic processing of all the information available in order to calculate prices and internally regulate exchanges. According to this logic, relying on moral values to carry out redistribution would ruin this spontaneous order since it would apply a biased perspective.

A major break took place between these two theories, which originated in the West, and is made up of two non-successive events. The first is the empowerment of logics of knowledge and action within a static social framework, which was still assured of its own stability. The seed had already been planted by the scientific activity of the 17th Century, which was itself enabled by the work of the artists of the Quattrocento, themselves in turn influenced by the political atmosphere of the Italian city-states. The gradual spread of reasoning destined, initially obscurely, for boundless expansion was promising and gave it legitimacy. It gave people hope for freedom over contingency, that is, efficiency. However, once the methodical basis of one approach after another was assured and they had started to be developed (mathematics, physics, astronomy), it did not take long for suspicions to arise that the freedom which they promised was actually being destroyed by the very action used to construct it. Logics of efficiency are built up and knocked down in the same movement. They are destroyed in an exactly proportional manner to how they are built. They are assured of controlling contingency insofar as they will lose control of it. They are efficient, and as such, they lack efficiency. In other words, since efficiency seeks to perpetually refine itself, it loses its efficiency.

Marx correctly observed this, in reference to man’s own act rising up as an objective obstacle and alienating him from himself [MAR 82, pp. 1065-66]. And yet, he saw the solution of this situation as being man voluntarily seizing control over their production and intensive exploitation of nature through a revolution. In their own way, Horkheimer and Adorno reflected on alienation, gathering information from their historical context, whose changes uncovered the Dialectic of Enlightenment [HOR 74]. Promising to tame nature and leave fears of the past far behind, it was destined to transform into exactly what it was intended to vanquish. In attempting to liberate man, it delivers him, body and soul, to the constraints of a managed society. Reasoning showed itself to be a coercive mechanism, perpetuating and accentuating the domination of exactly what man was striving to escape.

Logics of truth and action promised efficiency: freedom from contingency. However, in practice, they increased the influence of contingency over man. Although attempts were made to immunize efficiency logics against an ethical contagion in order to make their implementation autonomous, at the same time this encouraged their objective destruction, devastation of their efficiency and hence a loss of such logics. Since freedom from contingency was exactly what had motivated and thus enabled the initial empowerment of these logics, in a specifically European movement, the enslavement to contingency which these logics also brought about destroyed what would enforce their efficiency over ethics.

Therefore, the second moment of this unbridgeable discontinuity is a correction of the first. It is rooted in a characteristic of Christianity, which emerged during the Reformation and is expressed most precisely in Kantian criticism. This critical and corrosive approach, initially directed against the world and its pleasures, to which it opposes the solemnity of work, then again applied to knowledge in its scholarly form which wrongly attempts to directly understand the root meaning of things. Metaphysics, delivered as a science, is non-critical insofar as it intends to relate to an underlying principle itself, without concerning itself with the necessary conditions for our relationship with it. This was an important movement because it meant that logical reasoning had to be able to be developed indefinitely, without seeking respite in a definitive balance. However, it gave a more in-depth insight into the possibility of an indefinite criticism of every logic, and its internal adjustment, thus creating an intrinsic correction allowing it to limit the destruction which constantly accompanied its construction. Criticism attempts to destroy logics from the inside just enough for them to persevere. It destroys without defeating. It destroys in order to delay defeat.

At the social level, criticism helps to organize the development of logic through a neutral separation. In traditional societies, such as the caste system, where division between social groups has a religious aspect, separation as a product is disconnected from time. It is not perceived as a human institution. On the contrary, neutral separation is based on a common and homogeneous foundation. Every person is a person in full measure, even if they may be coerced into playing different social roles. Neutral separation is important for the empowerment of logics, which are no longer constrained by a rigid society. However, at the same time, since the development of logics clearly distinguishes one man from the other, the fact that separation is treated as neutral makes the consequences of the process unfair and intolerable. The critic, allowing the furthest possible logical development, in the same process condemns this logic and promotes thoughts and actions which run counter to it, not to maintain it but to destroy it. A compromise between the two can be found in the requirement of a continually renewed correction of these logics, by implementing legal constraints and by using these to influence logics of efficiency.

This correction is made by returning to the neutral setting, shown by the adoption of a meta-analysis of various logics. Rawls’ theory plays this role perfectly. It aims to control contingency in its three specific forms: the socioeconomic environment into which we are born, the talents with which we are endowed and the dangers or accidents which we may encounter throughout our life [RAW 09, p128]. Moreover, it regards different concepts of the good or systems of values as potential sources of conflict. It could even be argued that it presents being a member of such a system as a last arbitrary, and thus contingent, resort. Such a choice has value because it is a free choice, but not because it relies on the objective truth of such a system. Furthermore, a theory of justice has value because it is neutral in relation to these concepts, enabling it to guarantee a peaceful coexistence with them.

Neutral separation requires neutral justice, based on a separation which is neutral and indeterminate. The critic of the unacceptable is external to the situation and brings to it an abstract correction. Rawls observes that logics provide a correction, but the correction offered is not internal. The result, for such theories, is a meta-repetition of the criticized, a renewal of the very thing which is being condemned, but at a more general level. What Rawls considers as intolerable is the conflict based on what counts most to man: their concepts of the good. Since these are plural and antagonistic, he proposes creating the conditions for their peaceful coexistence. However, precisely by confirming their incommensurability, he prompts the diversity of communitarian counterclaims, and the closure by some of their own tradition on their side of the separation3. Recognizing that a system of values is justified simply because it is accepted by a community, as does someone as moderate as Michael Walzer [WAL 13], means confirming the meta-analysis of neutrality, but prohibiting the solution which it implies. That is to say, in practice, this commitment cannot be shared because it is not possible to find a neutral context for argument. It simply represents a shared engagement and, therefore, whatever may be said about it, a reasonable discussion seems to have no specific legitimacy against a de facto compromise.

If we want to examine how to correct logics of efficiency (which Rawls does not address, or at least not in this way), it is necessary to move from an abstract and external context (dictated by the idea of controlling contingency and conflict) to the regulation of the ethical process (based on the scientific concept of freedom). At this stage, this means two things: firstly, ethics cannot be confined to a vague, private and irrational sentiment; moreover, neither should ethics be reduced to an ordered system of determined values, even if they are the product of a long tradition. This attempt strives to be meta-ethical, precisely because it aims to avoid these two pitfalls.

Nevertheless, it places the concept of freedom in relation to logics of efficiency in their dimension of gradual development, as simultaneously constructive and destructive4. The present moment is one of excessive development of logics of action and truth which have become empowering, promoting individual and collective interests ever further, increasingly separating one man from the other, while showing him that such a separation is unjust. This turmoil also jeopardizes an order which appeared stable, since it does not apply to the same temporality: the environment and ecosystems. In practice, logics question all order, and the correction should not be sought in an order, either predefined or invented. It should not be sought in abstract legislation, since all legislation is now a logic5. The societies of the past, which embodied an order, unchanging in size, looking only to be renewed, to continually regain a precarious unity with an uneasy relationship with the past, contained within an endless commentary of classical thought, revolted. Thinking about efficiency means thinking about logics.

A logic is a transformed order, both in the sense that it develops an accelerated temporality and it becomes impoverished in its determination, which is then of unilateral precision, leading to the pluralization of logics. Therefore, the order is accelerated, pluralized into specific determinations and, at the same time, its integrative potential is diminished and disjointed.

Moreover, time has warped the solutions offered by tradition. Neoliberalism appears to have destroyed the ethical relevance of any appeal for immanence and freedom, by giving its name to the selfish and unbridled pursuit of individual interests6. The argument frequently used by economists to demand maximum deregulation is freedom for the agents to maximize profits. It appears that these theorists created a long-lasting separation between ethics and freedom. However, an ethical concept of freedom is also compromised by the communitarians, who insist on an engagement which connects us to some but in the same measure cuts us off from others and which therefore seems to be full of the antagonistic potential against which Rawls had warned.