Responsibility should be central to the design of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) strategies; in practice, however, this is not always the case. Research work and practical applications often focus on separate elements or constraints involved in RRI, or tracking projects prefiguring it, rather than considering inquiries and solutions built upon the richness of moral responsibility. Inquiry in this area may be empirical or normative or, better still, combine the best elements from both reciprocal approaches.

Previous volumes in the Responsible Research and Innovation series have addressed, seriously and confidently, the issue of responsibility from a variety of angles, demonstrating the breadth and power of this concept. This diversity should not be seen as a form of lazy ethical relativism, which is often implicit and makes the concept of responsibility appear inaccessible. Like La Fontaine’s fox¹, who scorned the grapes hanging just out of reach, this appearance of inaccessibility may lead us to disdain the notion of responsibility, the key element of RRI. In addition to obscuring the very raison d’être of a research project, this type of cognitive dissonance uses the existence of multiple interpretations of responsibility as a pretext to dismiss the concept entirely, or for arbitrary adoption of a single viewpoint. In reality, the diversity of interpretations demonstrates a high level of innovation in ethical terms. Responsibility implies a certain freedom², open to contingency and efficient³, which should be used creatively in order to respond to new situations, contexts and technical innovations transforming them. Moral responsibility should not be considered synonymous with obedience, compliance, repetition or indiscriminate application.

The intrinsic nature of responsibility has not always been so easily forgotten, and was not (as so often happens) limited to faulty and impotent rhetoric expressed in programs, platforms or the media. Responsibility has been used as a principle for political action, as original and promising with its potential displayed on the international stage. Promoted and defended by the European Union, this notion of responsibility was embodied in the form of the precautionary principle. This meta-principle, encapsulating several other principles, presents a significant advantage, in that it can be applied to, and used to connect, a wide variety of domains such as the sciences, ethics, politics and economics. As the principle took off, it was subject to a variety of interpretative controversies and attacks, due to the way in which it disrupted existing modes of operation and, in some cases, established a new order. Enemies of the precautionary principle included a number of states, who attacked it in arenas such as the World Trade Organization; philosophers, opposed to a caricatured version of the principle; and, ironically, certain thurifers of the precautionary principle, who damaged its reputation by indiscriminate and unsuitable applications.

The purpose of this book is to provide a thorough and balanced examination of the precautionary principle, considering its huge potential to express responsibility in the fields of research and innovation. The precautionary principle has a key part to play in the face of the most disruptive innovations. It is one of the most creative innovations for implementing responsibility in response to new fears surrounding environmental resilience or emerging technologies. It also constitutes one of the most original and well-received proposals of the European Union. RRI owes a certain debt to this institution, and still has a lot to learn from the precautionary principle⁴. In this work, we shall consider the ethics of the principle of responsibility.

The goal of this work is not simply to improve this meta-principle. We shall consider its interactions with ethical pluralism and with ethical and political deliberations, argumentation in context, and the challenges presented by the interdisciplinary approach⁵ in an uncertain climate. Taken separately, each problem extends the intention of this book outside of the sphere of RRI. Similarly, these problems need to be solved theoretically before any relevant practical application can be envisaged. A beneficial interplay also exists between practical and theoretical considerations; however, if these problems are not carefully considered from a theoretical perspective at the outset, application and, subsequently, standardization are impossible, whether in the field of research or innovation.

In this book, we shall consider a number of issues, centering on the collaborative choice of innovations and technologies, which will define the future of our world, and the way in which these worlds are to be evaluated in a context of scientific uncertainty and ethical indetermination, due to the existence of ethical pluralism. We shall begin by considering the famous Valladolid controversy concerning colonization of the New World. At present, we must consider a different form of “colonization of new worlds”, not in terms of occupying territories, but rather in terms of a variety of possible futures for our shared planet. An alternative title for this book might be Deliberations on the Best Possible Worlds.

These core aspects of RRI must be taken seriously. Following over 30 years of experiments in the field of Participatory Technology Assessment (PTA)⁶, the time has now come to establish a more coherent version; the same may be said of RRI, which, in some ways, follows on from PTA. The existence of the PTA concept is laudable, and it offers perspectives on the potential offered by reasoned and careful development of RRI.

Whilst RRI promotes the participation of interested parties or citizens, anticipative governance⁷ and due consideration of ethics, a number of theoretical and practical issues still need to be resolved. Although some of these issues have been considered in the context of PTA, no satisfactory solutions have been found.

This set of problems, which includes scientific, ethical, political and economic dimensions, may be summarized in the form of a question:

How can we deliberate together, on the basis of preliminary assessments taken from a large number of actors with different and contrasting abilities and expertise (because we include the participation of ordinary citizens, experts and stakeholders), following guidelines taken from democratic theories, concerning issues centering on innovative and controversial technologies with the potential to cause serious and/or irreversible damage?

In more philosophical terms, the issue may be expressed as follows:

Deliberate using different ethical justifications (taking into account elements of applied ethics, ethical theories and meta-ethical options) and different political theories, also taking account of natural and engineering sciences, and their associated disciplines, with their fields of relevance (and thus their implicit exclusions), and their modalities of producing proof and addressing uncertainty.

In this book, we shall consider the difficulties associated with the burden of judgment and with ethical disagreements, along with the cohabitation of scientific and ethical arguments, in order to find the best possible balance as a basis for political decisions. Several types of agreement and disagreement shall be considered, alongside paths to follow for conflict resolution; these paths are different to those used by the majority of philosophers, political sociologists and economists, who tend to take a macro-social, general approach. We aim to provide a new contribution to the in-depth study of the precautionary principle as a tool to structure decision in interdisciplinary contexts, in order to attain the very new world, a new world which is very different to that described in Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World ⁸.

In Part I, we shall employ the hypothesis used by Socrates in Euthyphron that the world of science is stable, unlike the world of ethics, which may differ from one person to the next and change friends into enemies. This ancient hypothesis is still applicable today, in a context where expertise in the field of ethics is often implicitly de-legitimate. We wish to refute this objection. We aim to move beyond the “epistemic abstinence” encountered in most contemporary political theories, justified by arguments based on Rawlsian theories of the burdens of judgment, because they are under-determined in relation to the argumentation requirement. Examples of this approach include the work of Habermas and the key tenets of the theory of deliberative democracy.

We defend an ethical pluralism, a “third way” clearly distinct from relativism and monism. We shall provide an overview of the ethical pluralism of ethical theories, not simply of the pluralism of values. These pluralisms will be replaced in the context of a dialogical and interdisciplinary theory of argumentation.

In the second part of the book, moving from prevention to precaution, our approach follows that of Le rationalisme qui vient ⁹, in which the sciences are considerably less “certain” than we might think. The problems discussed previously will be considered in relation to the methods for decision-making in uncertain contexts, the co-existence of sciences in an assessment situation and the distinction between epistemic and moral values, avoiding the dichotomy between the two, and instead promoting a co-dependent approach, in order to bring an end to confrontations between scientific hypotheses and their compatibility with ethical arguments.

The way in which the precautionary principle characterizes different sources of uncertainty, and the means of responding to this uncertainty in ordinary scientific activity, will be explored in detail. The principle will be used to create a responsible distribution of disciplines for technological evaluation, making a clear distinction between experts and scientists, in order to guarantee intra- and inter-disciplinary epistemic pluralism. Certain conditions, including the independence of experts, the use of certain deontological rules and the principle of contradictory debate, are necessary, but not sufficient, for this to happen.

Our approach is based on over 20 years of theoretical and empirical work in the field of inclusive (or participatory) technology assessment, known as PTA. Many researchers and practitioners have been involved in work in this domain, some of whom consider RRI as an extension of PTA, notably with regard to the importance of the participatory element (first pillar) in RRI. In this work, we shall reconsider a number of theoretical problems which subsist in the field of PTA, reconfigured by the passage toward RRI.

In writing this book, we have made use of texts from areas as varied as moral, political and scientific philosophy. We discuss and compare texts by authors often unaware of each other’s work, from Plato to Deleuze via Aristotle, Socrates, S. Kagan, S. Cavell, J. Rawls, J. Habermas, J.S. Toulmin, C. Perelman, J. Kekes, B. Latour, T. Kuhn, I. Stengers, N. Rescher, M.G. Morgan, M. Henrion., L. C.Becker, R. Ogien, H. Putnam, D. Ross, C. Stevenson, C.S. Peirce and J. Dewey, amongst other, less well-known, writers.

The organization of this text is intended to be as clear as possible, with a summary of key points in the conclusions to each section and each chapter. For this reason, we have overstepped the boundaries of RRI, to defend a pluralistic ethical meta-theory, at the same level as the power of controversial technologies and the environmental challenges which they present. This book therefore goes beyond some of the limits of Hans Jonas’, whose audacity cannot be underestimated, famous ethics, notably in relation to ethical pluralism and to the development of a public policy.

Bernard REBER

October 2016