Responsibility and Freedom

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.

Acknowledgments vii

Foreword ix

Introduction xvii

Chapter 1. Responsible Research and Innovation: A New Framework for an Old Controversy 1

Chapter 2. Responsibility: a Modern Concept 29

2.1. The modern formation of responsibility 29

2.2. Decoupling law and morality 37

2.3. The political implications of responsibility 58

2.4. Responsibility as an overarching concept 70

Chapter 3. Development of Freedom 79

3.1. The centrality of freedom 79

3.2. Legal freedom 82

3.3. Moral freedom 86

3.4. Ethical freedom 97

Chapter 4. An Ethical Perspective on Responsibility and Freedom 111

4.1. Ethics and morality 116

4.2. Responsibility and freedom: an ethical relation 123

Chapter 5. Framework for the Ethical Assessment of RRI 143

5.1. Historical overcoming of RRI 146

Conclusion 169

Bibliography 177

Index 189

Robert GIANNI is a researcher at the University of Namur in Belgium. His research focuses on Critical Theory and different approaches to the problem of justice with a special attention to its social repercussions.