Responsibility and Freedom: The Ethical Realm of RRI

By Robert Gianni

Responsible Research and Innovation appears as a paradoxical frame, hard to conceptualize and difficult to apply.  If on the one hand research and innovation appear to follow logics blind to societal issues, responsibility is still a blurred concept interpreted according to circumstances.

Different perspectives are implied in the RRI discourse rendering difficult also its application, because each social dimension proposes a different path for its implementation. This book will try to indicate how such conflictual understanding of RRI is caused by a reductive interpretation of ethics and, consequently, of responsibility.

The resulting framework will represent an ethical approach to RRI that could help in overcoming conflictual perspectives and construct a multi-layer approach to research and innovation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Feb 11, 2016
• ISBN: 9781119277378

Book preview

Introduction

L’ethique […] demeure problématique, c’est-à-dire fait problème qui donne à penser.

(Ethics […] remains problematic, i.e. a problem which needs to be thought about)

Kostas Axelos

Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) is a notion that can represent a great opportunity for the future of Europe, because it is meant to merge technical and economic imperatives with societal needs and desires. The aim is to generate not only an institutional framework, but also a proliferation of regulated practices to increment European well-being. However, it is still unclear how to understand this task given the multiple conceptual perspectives and several practical obstacles that such a wide notion implies.

If, on the one hand, responsibility is an ambiguous term, paving the way to different and sometimes conflicting interpretations, on the other hand, research and innovation appear to be imperatives that could be committed only to technical regulations and need as much freedom as possible. Accordingly, RRI appears as a container embedding conflicting perspectives for which the solution is at least puzzling.

If it is difficult to provide an objective and shared understanding of what RRI should be, its prescriptive side. It is possible, however, to describe RRI as the tool through which the political rationality of our time is exemplified and developed, and therefore what it is supposed to be.

However, this last statement is also far from being clear in its features.

At the heart of the notion of RRI lies the more radical problem of the relation between science and society. Far from being a new issue, this conflict has been ongoing for the last few decades in different shapes and forms.

Among the different problems that this relation has produced, we can define at least two disciplinary areas that have tried to solve them according to specific logics. Nevertheless, their common methodology is to refer to an external tool in order to regulate the debate.

A first dimension can be detected in the epistemic trust that scientific knowledge is neutral and objective. According to this perspective, the problems arising from research and innovation are due to some form of ignorance that can be easily overcome by means of scientific education. The consequences of an innovation or, in general, of research can be defined in advance if a valid methodology is adopted. Besides, all concerns about safety, in a broad sense, will be protected by laws and regulations, which all scientists and entrepreneurs must follow.

However, this perspective does not appear to be able to solve what have been call epistemic conflicts [VON 93]. Scientific points of view regarding the future outcomes of a technology have proven to be conflicting, generating an epistemic tangle from which we cannot get out via epistemic means. Moreover, technologies, and especially innovations, have a strong societal target, meaning that they will be applied or used in a context that is not limited to a research laboratory. Thus, science objectivity could be used by policy-makers, or specific subjects, as a justification for personal reasons [VON 93, PES 03].

A second approach in trying to solve the problem stands on a moral level. In fact, here the solutions proposed follow not a scientific path but a moral one. If research and innovation have a societal impact and, if epistemically speaking, we cannot reach a shared perspective, then we need to find other ways of assessing potential outcomes. Here, the proposed solution is to assume a moral perspective that could drive the process in deciding what is good and what is bad. However, this approach generates two kinds of problems. The first one is that moral perspectives are not singular, and most of the time not even stable regarding science in its general sense. Morality, although it could have the same syntactic sense, finds several different semantic understandings. The plurality of perspectives generates moral clashes that are even stronger than the epistemic ones. Thus, the criterion according to which decision should be taken needs to be found in an external reference on which all the subjects concerned could possibly agree. Such a criterion are often identified in the recourse to reason and the establishment of a corresponding procedure. If concerned agents deliberate and decide according to a set of rules defined by a rational morality, then the result should be a stable and shared one. There are several variations of an approach that basically rely on Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason [KAN 97]. This strategy has the great merit of looking for an external reference in order to reach an agreement on problematic issues. However, this perspective has turned out not to be necessarily successful. The second problem in fact, generated at a moral level, is that if it is adopted as a purely rational procedure for solving issues, we might reach a justification but we could be missing the actual agreement by all agents. The reference to reason prescinds from subjective perspectives exactly by taking into account the objective side of subjectivity. In other words, reason is assumed to have this double nature of being present in every agent but not based on specific and relative aspects. In this way, the debate shifts to a purely objective side. However, this necessary blindness to aspects other than reason could generate a personal detachment from the results of what reason has established. Research and innovation amplify this possibility because their outcomes could provoke a strong impact on people’s lives. As shown by Gunther [GUN 98], Ferry [FER 02] and many others, there is an enormous distance between the justification of a norm and its application. The advantage of a morally rational perspective, like the one embedded in discourse theory [HAB 98], is to abstract from irrational and unjustifiable contributions to the decision-making process. However, this abstractness also represents its deepest limit.

These kinds of approaches have the great merit of taking into account a transcendental reference that could serve as a tool for generating concerted norms and rules. The mistake lies, according to my perspective, in appointing an ontological primacy to this transcendental reference, which it cannot assume in reality. In other words, reason can and should be used as a tool for resolving social issues, but when it is assumed to be also the actual basin where all values, desires and interests should be comprised. We then assist to a sort of short circuit. The fact that agents should follow reasonable ways for fulfilling their life expectations does not mean that their lives are exhausted by reason. The logical mistake is generated by the fact that reason is made the only reference for achieving goals and objectives. To put it in another way, if reason is conceived as our aim, and not just as a tool by which we can define our aims, all what falls out of reason cannot be accepted [FER 02, WILa 84, LEN 03, HON 91, HON 14a].

However, if the recourse to reason generates several theoretical and practical difficulties, there is still the need to find an external reference on which to base debates. If reason as a transcendental value should be rejected, we should not throw the baby out with the bath water. If reason cannot be itself the aim of a debate, it can and must be the tool by which to generate one’s aims, desires and preferences in order to overcome social clashes.

Nevertheless, we are still left with the question of the reference by which we can hope to develop a common solution to plural perspectives.

I believe that the reason for which science, and R&I in our update language, has started to undergo a general mistrust by the general public is because at a certain point it has been perceived and understood as a threat to one’s freedom. I believe that all the different protests as well as the reasons provided for assuming a position in those debates were all referring, implicitly or explicitly, to the necessity of guaranteeing freedom to individuals.

I believe this to be true on two different, but related, levels.

A first level is the fact that potential negative outcomes could endanger people’s lives or the way they would eventually decide how to live their lives. If the first set of issues is detectable in all those consequences connected to health or security areas, the second one is identifiable with products or processes that will predefine how people are going to manage their private relations. In this second sense, we can easily find in privacy issues or, for instance, two of the most controversial aspects.

However a second level refers to a perceived threat on one’s freedom and concerns the way in which governance measures are put in place in order to decide about people’s freedom. At this stage, the opposition raises questions with regard to the liberty that agents are given to decide about their future. In other words, the decisions regarding what is going to implement people’s life are made without taking into account people themselves.

These two levels are so strictly connected that, according to my perspective, they have caused, and still do today, a general concern with regard to research and innovation.

This perspective could also be seen as valid, if we consider again the reference to reason that I have made above. It is not sufficient that certain products or processes are rationally justified in order for them to be accepted, because they could still represent a menace to freedom and affect fundamental aspects of people’s lives, such as their values, desires, interests, etc.

This strong reference to freedom makes us able to replace the ontological primacy assigned to reason by a Kantian legacy with freedom. I believe that the aim and the criterion by which we can judge the goodness of a product or a process can be identified with freedom. Freedom can play this role given its double nature. On the one hand, it is a transcendental reference to which none of us would want to renounce (logically speaking, renouncing to it already implies a free choice). On the other hand, however, the articulation and contents that identify such freedom cannot be determined in an objective way. Apart from the necessary conditions of possibility, that is the possibility itself of being free and at a more radical way, the necessity to exist, all the contents can be determined only at an individual and immanent way. Thus, we can understand this double nature and the fundamental role it plays in our lives. This is a concept that is transcendental in its necessity but contingent in its way of being articulated.

In order to take a path that can lead us out of this thorny scenario, we need to rely on the importance that freedom has in this matter. Therefore, the hypothesis that I take as the anchor point for developing an assessment of science with regard to society is based on the fact that every measure that can be adopted in order to regulate this relation should be based on freedom.

As the problems are identifiable on two levels, the potential solutions also have to develop according to this double layer. On the one hand, the development of products and processes needs to be done with the aim of guaranteeing the basic conditions of freedom, that is the possibility of existence. Furthermore, these goods should try to be conceived as a way to implement the articulations of freedom, either in a quantitative or qualitative way. On the other hand, the decisions on what products or processes could serve the purpose should not be taken without taking into concrete consideration what the people concerned think about it.

The new framework of RRI is based on two main factors, as we have seen. In fact, it tries to respond to the necessity to foster research and innovation, but to do so in a responsible way. The paradox that seems to be embedded in this framework can be easily overcome if we think of it in terms of freedom.

On the side of research and innovation, what is required is freedom to promote specific investigations. Research needs to be left free for the sake of the freedom of research itself. Researchers want to develop novelties that by definition cannot be foreseen. Innovations, which are market-directed [SCH 34a], focus on the possibility of increasing other aspects of freedom, like with material needs. Although the kind of freedom involved might differ in the case of research or innovation, the common reference to it cannot be denied.

The same can be said for responsibility. It involves different acceptions but the common reference to all its acceptions is always the presupposition of correspondent freedom [VIN 12]. Liability is based on a negative understanding of freedom, as well as care, which involves a more existential attitude to existence. However, even if we could detect different understandings of what it means with regard to responsibility, freedom is always the aim and main reference for every responsibility.

Furthermore, responsibility is the response we give to a freedom that we need to guarantee.

As we have already mentioned, the question of freedom falls between two levels, and the same goes for responsibility.

If it is true that we need to respond to the freedom of someone or something, it is also true that this is possible only on the basis of the freedom we must depart from. In other words, the duty entailed by responsibility can be taken in charge and fulfilled only if we are free to choose otherwise. It would not make sense, even at a strictly juridical level, to charge an un-free being of a responsibility [HAR 08].

Accordingly, we need to make sure that agents contributing to the development of research and innovation are free, so to be able to act responsibly. However, this could be ensured only at an institutional level. When it comes to research and innovation, we cannot pretend that freedom and responsibility can be left to individuals. Although the individual contribution is crucial to achieve responsible practices of research and innovation, this effort can be made only according to institutional conditions that enable and allow an agent to choose. Surely, this refers to more direct measures, such as funding possibilities of regulatory frames, but it also concerns all those pedagogical and facilitating functions that an institution should entail.

On the one hand, we have the educational role performed in order to make agents able to learn from and with each other. On the other hand, we have the facilitation of stable practices of confrontation among agents in order to develop a reciprocal awareness of each other’s freedoms. This would also generate a side-effect that unveils the necessary relational and complementary nature of our European societies.

Although different social spheres speak different languages, they all depend on each other and they all share the same fundamental value of freedom. Accordingly, their aim, being a common one, should be unveiled through a constant dialectical relation in order to reciprocally tune their languages.

This institutional dimension is then fundamental if we want to develop responsible forms of research and innovation in an ethical sense. In fact, the way to avoid that responsibility, reduced to a rhetorical discourse in order to legitimize a specific unethical political rationality [EWA 86], is to ground it to a complementary perspective within an institutional context. Only in this way can we protect responsibility and the freedom connected from manipulation or distortions.

I believe that RRI embeds all these aspects and is a framework based on a concrete awareness of it ethical needs. RRI is an ethical framework based on the need to respond to the freedom that calls us from the future but that requires a common effort toward it that we should make today.

We cannot predict what it will mean to be free in the future. We do know that for that freedom to be possible, we must ensure certain basic conditions. However, the articulations of those freedoms and our responsibilities can only be established within a historically determined context, and our task is to be able to respond to all the new freedoms and to the very possibility for freedom itself, that is to respond to its nature, to be free.

As brilliantly defined by Owen et al., responsibility, and therefore freedom, will have to detect and shape according to societal developments: Responsibility is a social ascription that has changed and evolved over time, in part reflecting the changing nature and norms of society. What we […] argue is that how we think about responsibility in the context of science and innovation now needs to change again, reflecting the modern context in which innovation occurs. This requires a redrawing of the contours of responsibility, including, but going beyond evidence-based regulation and established codes of responsible conduct in science [OWE 13, p. 30].

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007-2013 under grant agreement no. 321488 (Project FP7-SCIENCE-IN-SOCIETY-2012-1, Governance of Responsible innovATion, GREAT).

1

Responsible Research and Innovation: a New Framework for an Old Controversy

Recent developments in economics and politics across the world have not only modified power relations between different nations and thereby changed the contours of the two spheres, but they have also completely changed the whole idea of progress forcing to change plans according to criteria that are no longer exclusively functional or economic.

On the one hand, we find imperatives of material growth that demand alternative routes to economic development. On the other hand, traditional forms of legitimizing decisional processes no longer seem able to respond to the ever more pressing claims of societies increasing concern about their futures.

For purely material reasons regarding the scarcity of resources and the impossibility of sharing common rules in a global context, the European Union (EU) had to modify, enlarge and differentiate its sphere of action from the mere production of material goods following the tenets of Fordist capitalism to the creation of more complex knowledge, the production of which is better able to respond to the dynamics of a post-Fordist system. As shown by recent analyses about the relationship between capital, production and market [PIK 14, STR 14], European economic development is now closely linked to progress in production of knowledge as opposed to the exploitation of materials. In this sense, it is knowledge(s) that is the central economic strategy aimed at obtaining economic progress. It is, therefore, fundamental to increase measures designed to liberate the potential inherent in Research and Innovation (R&I), paying special attention to Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), as they are more likely to produce flexible solutions.

R&Is are then identified as the main responses in order to deal with the shift in the barycenter of global capitalism because they are more flexible and able to produce a higher profit with a little investment.

More precisely, innovation, which is based on the model developed by Schumpeter, specifically answers the requests of avoiding an approach of intensive exploitation, unfeasible in the European context, and of using existing resources. As we know, Schumpeter introduced a non-circular and dynamic model of an economy based on the capability of the entrepreneur to have an intuition and to introduce a new combination of existing factors onto the market [SCH 34a]. Economic development, according to Schumpeter, consists mostly of the different employment of existing resources, in doing new things with them, without considering if these resources have increased or not [SCH 34a, p. 70]. Innovation is composed of three main aspects for Schumpeter: a spontaneous change, within a dynamic theoretical apparatus incarnated in the figure of the entrepreneur [SCH 34, p. 81]. The entrepreneur must act according to the novelty; he/she will imagine a depiction of the future. The prediction of effects of an economic endeavour is, for Schumpeter, impossible. Even with an intense preliminary work we cannot exhaustively grasp all the effects and repercussions of the plan. The length of such prevision would be theoretically impossible, according to the environment and the occasion, when we dispose of unlimited means and time, poses difficulties that are practically insurmountable [SCH 34a, p. 83]. Therefore, the entrepreneur, due to an intuition, will put in place that operation of mixture and interdisciplinary transposition of a methodology, a product, a market, resource or reorganization. Accordingly, the entrepreneur, due to an intuition, will put in place an operation of shuffle and interdisciplinary transposition of a method, a product, market, supply source or [re]organization [SCH 34a, p. 68]. Considering the tendency to habitual behaviors that pervades the human realm, innovation will happen only as an expression of a great liberty by its entrepreneur. We also need to underline the clear difference that Schumpeter emphasizes between invention and innovation where the latter represents the commercialization of an invention aimed at the satisfaction of needs. Until they are not adopted in practice, the inventions from an economic point of view are irrelevant. And to actualize an improvement is a different task from the one inventing it [SCH 34a, p. 86].

Schumpeter’s conception is based on the leadership that will be able to modify consumers’ preferences according to their capacities of imagining and recombining. It is then not difficult to grasp the connection between this conception and the importance of innovation that has been assumed for maintaining and developing the economy, especially during a period of crisis.

However, this model ended fairly soon by having been applied to itself. As the promotion of social and material progress itself requires economic strategies of highly innovative character, creativity, imagination and flexibility have become key words in order to obtain results in the field of research and innovation [HON 10, pp. 78–103].

In brief, if innovation in Schumpeter’s acception is directed towards the changing of products and processes, which we have been witnessing for some years, it could be defined as a change in the paradigm of innovation [GOD 07], that is to say an innovation of innovation itself1.

These changes, however, in the forms of production and the change in access to information as well as the development of new ways of participating in political life, have resulted in consequences of a practical nature in the social repercussions contributing to a real change in the current declination of the idea of progress, which can no longer be understood only according to the dictates of an economic system isolated from the rest of society. Nanotechnologies, genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and several other examples of disruptive technological innovations have caused considerable public outcry owing to consequences of which the effects are not fully known. This indignation has been raised not only because of the presence of these products on the market, but also for the way in which their commercialization was handled, being excluded from the assessment of any moral or ethical aspect. These events and the modalities of the relationship between society and institutions have generated a radical change in the forms of governance through which the interaction between science and society must be regulated. Because of its enormous social impacts, the satisfaction of needs, the main objective of Schumpeterian innovation, must be conjugated in other terms. We cannot limit the understanding of progress, which innovations should contribute to generation, to a technical or economic development, isolated from the rest of society.

Together with the above tendencies, there have also been developments confined to the political sphere where a greater access to information and knowledge and new deliberative forms of democracy have gradually been replacing traditional and dogmatic forms of representation in decisional processes [REB 05, ROS 08, REB 05, GOF 09].

If, as we have said, the need to compete with emerging global realities means that it is necessary to speed up innovation processes, at the same time these processes need to be guided, regulated and encouraged. It is, therefore, essential to establish criteria and parameters in order to evaluate the qualitative prism of research and innovation without this being an obstacle.

This is the aim of the criterion of responsibility, introduced definitively in Europe through the framework of responsible research and innovation (RRI), so as to respond both to the needs concerning the correct functionality of the innovation process and its ethical and political legitimacy. On the one hand, we need to increase the efficacy of R&I as a tool for developing our economies. On the other hand, we must guarantee the legitimacy in the way R&I is steered in respect to society and its needs, values and norms. From a logical point of view, efficacy tends toward practical application of a measure whether legitimacy relies on a theoretical justification of the adoption of certain measures. From a moral perspective, it is not clear which position we could assume in order to develop a legitimate process of R&I. Furthermore, the interpretations of the meaning of responsibility are not entirely clear in their connections. Ethically, it is also unclear how to conceive the relationship among different social spheres given the equal importance of the two sides of the coin. Finally, even on a political side, legitimacy and efficacy seem to be two imperatives difficult to conciliate in the decision-making process. We can underline once again the lively development of new processes for exerting democratic dialectics.

As a result of such an attempt, we are witnessing the redefinition of the concept of progress as the implementation of the relationship between freedom and equality in material and cultural terms.

For these reasons, of a different nature but all related to progress, the EU is developing the definition of a new framework able to respond to the challenges logically connected to this double imperative of legitimacy and efficacy. The notion of RRI emerges from the contemporary articulation between science, technology, economy and society. The increased complexity of technology, and research in general, has pushed us to find new comprehensive manners for steering innovation in science. In order to find the criteria that could contribute to define RRI in its components and as a whole, we need to try to understand its different aspects. The double imperative of legitimacy and efficacy requires the development of a conceptual proposal that can take into account all the difficulties, theoretical and practical, that such a notion entails. Our plan for this chapter is to make a short review on the different interpretations proposed with respect