Responsibility and Freedom

The Ethical Realm of RRI

Robert Gianni

• Editorial: Wiley-ISTE
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781119277378
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Business
• Categoría: Business Ethics

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.

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 to RRI. First, we need to understand the evolution of a framework that, far from being a novelty, represents the last step of a long process that started in Europe at least 40 years ago. This will help us to understand the difficulties that emerged throughout the years and the solutions adopted. If the problems are quite clear from a conceptual point of view, the solutions or hypotheses for a solution are embedded in the political evolution themselves. A short review and the analysis of the latter could perhaps indicate the path for us to take.

Second, it will be important to grasp the conceptual proposals that have been suggested in the past to answer the questions arising from similar issues. From there, we will arrive at current developments proposed in respect to the framework of RRI. RRI being a new development, most of these interpretations tend to be prescriptive rather than descriptive, trying to define what RRI should be instead of what it is. We will analyze these theories and the paradigms at their bases according to the two criteria of legitimacy and efficacy, so as to be able to understand which aspects could be useful and which are not useful in helping us solve our thorny issues. At the end of this chapter, we will have analyzed the contours, problems, challenges and opportunities that such a framework entails.

We have hinted at the originality of RRI as being the answer to the economic challenges together with the social problems it entails. The social remodeling at the basis of these dynamics requires an effort that is itself innovative.

However, far from being an original problem, the relationship between science and society has often stumbled on its path in looking for a balanced solution. The relationship among different perspectives, the discrepancies in the interpretations of progress, as well as the complex relation between norms, their application and justification, are all problems that several authors have tried to solve throughout the last two centuries [GUN 98, FER 02, HAB 70, HAB 72, BEC 92, JON 79].

Until the 1970s, the general public still trusted, or, to a certain extent, was even enthusiastic about science: “In the 1960’s there was a widespread optimism about technology. The contraceptive pill, television, fashion, and more access to pleasure and leisure activities were changing social relationships across the class system, at a time when the ravages of World War II were fading. In 1963, the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s famous speech enthused about ‘How the Britain that is going to be forged in the white heat of this revolution will be no place for restrictive practices or outdate methods on either side of industry”’ [SYK 13].

This relationship, however, has deteriorated owing to the diffusion of conceptualizations that emphasize the risk, as well as to negative historical developments. Prior to the 1960s, there were of course criticisms, not only in philosophy [CAR 62] concerning the misuse of technology [HEI 08, HOR 02, HUS 70]. This type of criticism, however, taking into account its peculiarities, remained within the Weberian dichotomization, according to which there is an unbridgeable demarcation between technological and instrumental rationality. In this way, this conception, which developed according to forms and in different fields throughout the 20th Century, has led to the need to rethink the relationship between the two tendencies.

During the 1960s, this dichotomization became more radicalized due to an ideological superimposition with instrumental knowledge. Knowledge and sciences were no longer at this point simply blind disciplines activated by a necessary development but rather they had become ideological instruments of the elevation of values or expression of power (Foucault, Habermas). The perverse relationship between ideology and knowledge that was brought to light during that decade will lead to a counteroffensive that will concern various disciplines. The attempts made from a philosophical point of view [ARE 05, JON 79, HAB 68], and the sociological point of view [PAR 91, BEC 92], to recompose this fracture or at least to draw attention definitively to this unjustifiable distance must be read in this light. The famous formulae for which “knowledge is power and power is knowledge” and “knowledge” always presupposes an interest, shed much more light on this problem than a more anarchic criticism, and sum up what, a few years later, would be transformed into concrete measures aimed at redefining the entire institutionalized scenario.

Many of these conceptualizations essentially indicated an increase in participatory initiatives and the increase in the use of reflective practices as the way forward. Following on from the intersubjective and communicative redefinition of the criteria of Kantian legitimacy, some of these theorizations exercised a decisive role in the development of initiatives and practices aimed at placing science in a social framework.

It was not by chance, in my opinion, that a whole series of policy-advising activities focused on the evaluation of the impact and consequences of technology began to be generated in that decade.

As reported by Sikes and Macnaghten: “A key influence was the development of technology assessment (TA) organizations which emerged in the United States and Europe from the 1970’s. These organizations were typically linked to the legislature aimed at providing authoritative information to U.S. Congress and parliaments to inform decision-making, and to provide early warning of future technological mishaps. The paradigm of TA reflected a model that presumed that the ‘problem’ of technology associated with a lack of democratic (and technical) input in technological governance and that this could be redressed through providing elected representatives with authoritative information at an early stage [VAN 97c]. Thus, the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) was established in 1972 by Congress to provide information on the secondary effects of t...

Índice

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 Responsible Research and Innovation: a New Framework for an Old Controversy
• 2 Responsibility: a Modern Concept
• 3 Development of Freedom
• 4 An Ethical Perspective on Responsibility and Freedom
• 5 Framework for the Ethical Assessment of RRI
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement