Innovation and Responsibility Set
coordinated by
Robert Gianni and Bernard Reber
Volume 4
First published 2019 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
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ISBN 978-1-78630-174-1
The majority of the books published in the set Innovation and Responsibility (IR)1 are in the field of political and moral philosophy. It is indeed the richness and plasticity of the concept of moral responsibility that must innervate the rising notion of IR. Here we have a book that ventures into the field of metaphysics, and it is welcome. Indeed, many institutional discourses and much academic literature dedicated to the notion of IR often speak of anticipation in an uncertain world, or even of preserving the possible. However, they do not think any further about the modalities of the possible, and with them the responsibilities to be imagined under these conditions. Virgil Cristian Lenoir sees very far and travels back far upstream to investigate the components of this problem, which rests in a particular way with each iteration, demanding creative responsibility. Responsibility requires much more than complying with a clearly identified set of rules or being able to anticipate. The creative possible is a milieu that implies that there is always more to a situation than what we can see, calculate or even predict. In addition, the increasing specialization of researchers whose activities are focused on tabulations of mutually exclusive possibilities contributes to the reduction of the possible.
The purpose of this book is even more ambitious since Lenoir engages in this reflection in a comparative way, straddling the West and the East. This detour is not a luxury. In this way he does not give in to the projected sirens of an East that would have understood things better than we do, but instead the book attempts to establish a responsible (responsive) encounter, a conversation, between these two worlds at a time when their economies, modes of innovation and related risks have become interdependent. The final part of the book draws practical conclusions from this reorganization of the thinking of possibilities to challenge the vague but prevalent theory of the Invisible Hand in economics. Although neither the author to whom it is attributed, Adam Smith, nor serious economists refer to it much, this metaphor and the belief in the virtues of the market it supports still inspire many decision-makers. In terms of the theses it develops, the book also takes care to review research processes that were intended to be innovative and prefigure the requirements of IR.
Here are some important points that have contributed to this reflection on responsibility, without exhausting the richness of this powerful philosophical work.
First of all, in response to several works in the series that have indicated that responsibility is not conformity, control or mechanical application, Lenoir reminds us that it is not enough to do one's professional duty, to comply with certain moral rules or to apply values, even in a thoughtful way [LOI 18, LEN 15, PEL 16, MAE 17]. Responsibility depends less on the application of a particular norm, rule or value than on the accountability process in a given context. Indeed, since responsibility exposes consciousness to unpredictability due to certain forms of scientific and technological innovation, it must itself be creative. The next step which needs to be considered and taken is therefore to recognize every new context and with it a renewed thought of contingency and therefore of the assumed links between necessity, reality and possibility. This therefore renews the way of thinking about norms or responsibility in context, but also about what we consider to be universally valid. Indeed, the universal is at stake at the level of the characterization of the ethical relevance of effective conditions in situations. The criterion is not that a condition applies to all humans without exception. It is richer in possibility because it concerns the relationship between people in context, at the cost of a new explanation each time. The expected creativity is therefore based on careful use of the term universal.
More fundamentally, it is necessary to recognize the importance of thinking and implementing accountability in general and IR in particular as a process where the possible has its place. However, responsibility is subject to a double paradox. The first is that there is no responsibility without the willingness and commitment of a subject, but to think of action as only being caused by the subject is to prohibit the success of responsible action that is disproportionate to them and that they cannot accomplish without reference to other dimensions involved in the situation. The second is that responsibility is determined by knowledge that must cope with increased unpredictability due to global interrelationships at a human, scientific and technical level. Often the effectiveness of science lies in a defined relationship to the possible. However, the possibility or impossibility of acquring knowledge and the accessibility of the modes of this knowledge make the truth of contingent knowledge dependent insofar as this truth itself depends, for its expression, proof and implementation on a given context, on experimentation and techniques, or even on the language of the research. In some cases, an examination of these sciences, with their laws, the construction of their objects, up to their hypotheses, will have to involve considering and questioning their modal status. It is therefore a question of reconsidering the link between the necessary, the real and the possible. This perspective also contributes to a gradual enrichment of the understanding of freedom. Lenoir's very novel contributions to modal logic can be categorized with work on the meta-principle of precaution [REB 17], one of the eminent forms of IR or political and ethical responsibility. Indeed, even in some of its administrative statements, the latter refers to the ascent to the scientific hypotheses at the origin of the understanding of the phenomena to be avoided.
The issues addressed from the base up by Virgil Cristian Lenoir are equally relevant to innovation. In a new situation, there is often a need to combine knowledge, interests, values and laws. A logical constraint that may have been a solution to a previous situation then arises as an obstacle when the situation changes. This logic which has become routine, often applied mechanically, must be re-examined or even changed. There is a danger of summarizing the possibilities in an exhaustive, given and established list, which would dramatically impoverish the creative possible at work and its resources for taking responsibility. This freezing of conditions, downstream, corresponds to the forgetting of their possibility and to a mechanical, stereotypical application of these conditions, which we believe to be effective because they have been able to work in the past, without a careful return to the new situation we are in. This extends to our understanding of novelty. We must be able to broaden the perspective. There is no longer a single possible world, the one we inhabit, but a plurality of possible worlds. In their plurality, the possible worlds then allow a salutary retreat from the situational constraints at work experienced as an absolute necessity. The possible worlds express various relationships to the contingency at work each time in a situation. They make it possible, through their plurality, to defuse conditions that have become constraining, thus closing down a single plane of intelligibility.
Lenoir invites us to sometimes reject a naive ontological vision that would encourage us to look at a world of objects determined in themselves that we would simply name by trying to match what we say to what we encounter. His point is particularly relevant for the speeches, nowadays we say stories, which cover some emerging technologies [GRU 16]. Research and innovations seem to accelerate history, revealing that the subject and the world do not pre-exist, determined as such and in a fixed way, to their connection. It is a comfort of hurried thinking. The same is true of the possible and the actual. In both cases, it is their interweaving that is first. They only then freeze in the necessary dualities that condition our experience, to the point that we can no longer understand it without going through them. Lenoir invites us not to forget this omission, presented as necessary. He therefore also denounces in his own way the error of Husserl and Heidegger, who believed they had exceeded Hegel by affirming the pre-eminence of the possible over the actual (Wirklich). For Hegel, moreover, the reconciliation (Versöhnung) between “is” and “ought to” in the shared life of humans implies that ”ought to” does not always remain an aspiration disappointed by the facts. Our responsibility is always to make ethical freedom effective. His book therefore also advances reflection on the relationship between responsibility and freedom [GIA 16]. All the works in the IR set of books defend effective liability in their own way.
The audacity of this reflection undoubtedly comes from the detour through Chinese thought that we find in the second part of the book. It is not simply because responsibility has become global that we must radically rethink the way in which different worlds of thought must be mobilized. One of the aims of this book is to bring to light a place where the best of European and Chinese traditions of thought and wisdom meet. The challenge is to stress that the contribution of Chinese thinkers is not limited to the question of inner wisdom, but that it is able to contribute to a political wisdom at the same level as the problems addressed in the first part. Their very rich process-based thinking and the lack of watertight separation between the different fields of knowledge are the two main reasons for a detour to classical China. We will therefore not have a comparison here, but a detailed conceptualization of what makes an effective process ethical, and responsible. Lenoir works, for example, on the notions of sincerity in the face of manifest discordance or injustice, and non-attachment, without indifference and therefore free, in order to assume the conditions responsibly rather than being determined by them.
Bernard REBER
Research Director at the CNRS
Policy Research Centre
Sciences Po Paris
The efficiency of the logics of human action, their ability to achieve defined goals, requires a close relationship to the possible. Without this relationship, they would not be effective. But this possibility can be either opened up to its perpetuation or blocked in a technical set of abstract conditions.
“Process” refers here to the viability of what is possible in each situation. This possibility is always already shared, opening up to an ethical1 interaction between the actors involved in this situation2. If this interaction is not ethical, it is because the logic at work has already deviated from the possible, where it was in its element and was therefore running smoothly. The elucidation of the intrinsically ethical structuring of certain processes is the main issue of this book.
“Responsibility”, as it will be understood here, takes the form of the structural link through which the freedoms of the actors are co-involved. Today, this responsibility must be exercised under conditions of uncertainty and unpredictability, largely linked to the gains in precision and efficiency of science and technology achieved through global processes of constant innovation. This increased precision, by the way in which it accounts for reality, masks its contingency. Desiring an ever stronger grip, it intensifies the contingency, and therefore the unpredictability, every time.
RRI (responsible research and innovation) is a powerful attempt to re-think, develop and articulate the normative content of liability in this context of contingency. For the moment, we are lacking a robust concept of responsibility, i.e. a thought that does not pose the action as the act of a “subject”, which would be the “cause” of it through its “will”, but rather sees it (at least in a complementary way) as a process in the possible at work in a situation. In order to justify this move, we must begin by exposing two of the paradoxes to which the classical3 perspective leads us.
The first can be formulated as follows4: a “subject” is responsible to someone on the basis of an unresolved discrepancy between the situation as it is and the same situation as it ought to be. Responsibility in this perspective affects a “willingness”, conscious of one’s duties to others, under given situational provisions. It can be a determined relationship between people (kinship, etc.) or simply a position of strength where the “subject” is, and which engages them. Responsibility forces the “subject” to take into account the interests of others at the same time as, and perhaps even more urgently than, their own. In any case, this implies a gap, at the situational level, between empirical reality and moral requirement, such that an objective requirement pushes the “subject” to work for the transformation of the situation in the latter's direction.
At the same time, the simple effort of an individual will, because of its multiple limitations (weaknesses, biases, partiality, prejudices of all kinds), cannot bring the empirical reality of the situation to the level of its moral requirement. For this is a “reconciliation” that does not ask just for the responsibility of one will or one individual, nor of several, nor, undoubtedly, of all taken one by one. Responsibility does not start with the will and cannot end with it. However, there is no real responsibility without conscience and will. Without a commitment and indignation towards the situational gap between what is and what ought to be, the “subject” cannot be responsible (and it is not said that this “subjective” perspective should or can simply be eliminated). In other words, “Turkish fatalism”, denounced by Leibniz5 has no reason to be. Engagement is a first step, but it must lead to an effective reconciliation, which must be recognized as largely independent of the will of the actors, taken one-by-one or altogether.
How can we expose this paradox? To talk about responsibility, it seems that we have to talk about a “subject”. If not, is it actually “responsibility”? But if responsibility is that of a “subject”, it seems that they are engaging in an enterprise that they will not be able to overcome, since precisely being able to live up to their responsibility is impossible for the “subject”, alone and naked. To think of action only as “caused” by a “subject”6, according to their “will”, is to prohibit the success of responsible action, which is disproportionate to them, and which they cannot accomplish without reference to another dimension. At the same time, we speak of responsibility in everyday language, for a “subject” and a “will” implemented in an action. And, in case of an unexpected or unusual discrepancy between what is and what ought to be, it is the latter that will be held accountable.
A second paradox, also linked to the responsibility of a “subject”, and a second axis of questioning appear from the relationship of the requirement of responsibility to the nature of the knowledge to which it relates7. A relationship with knowledge, which is nowadays a relationship with objectivity, must be involved in the issue at hand. This is because the knowledge specific to the time must become a means at the service of this responsibility. But, as we have noted, the very structure of the knowledge available to us is causing increasing difficulties for this responsibility, since it dangerously accuses contingency by increasing the unpredictability of the new that will emerge from global interrelationships, at the human, scientific and technological level.
One of the challenges here will be to rethink the concept of “objectivity” in order to remove it from its traditional opposition to “subjectivity”. It is a question of formulating a robust conception of objectivity (in its effectiveness), which is nonetheless non-dual, which escapes traditional dualities (soul-body, intelligible-sensible, etc.), and is nevertheless capable of making its effectiveness intelligible: its relationship to and its possible instrumentalization for an accomplished freedom.
However, it is its articulation with the knowledge available in its current form that alone can enable this study to clarify the implications of responsibility today. If this questioning does not take the form of an epistemology or an ontology, and if it must nevertheless relate to objective knowledge, what could its relationship be to this knowledge, which it must recognize, but also discuss? It cannot reproduce or mimic this knowledge. It does not have to say something that this knowledge could have said, much less something that it already contains. It must question this knowledge. More precisely, it must ask what makes it effective.
Let us suggest, at the outset, a hypothesis. Let us assume that what constitutes this effectiveness is a specific relationship to the possible at work in a situation.
This specific relationship makes this knowledge effective. But what is known is always only the way objects are possible using the formal tools that are wielded in a science. We must also ask how these tools, concepts, axioms, hypotheses and experiences are possible. If the effectiveness of science lies in a defined relationship to the possible, an examination of these sciences, with their hypotheses, laws and constructed objects, intended to clarify this effectiveness, will have to involve reconsidering and questioning their modal status.
If we assume that a “subject” is the “cause” of their actions by their “will”, they will be responsible for seeking, through science, “control” of their actions in their consequences. But this is insufficient, and efficiency itself, not to mention “efficacy”, or efficiency in accordance with an ethical process, cannot be understood in these terms. The sciences will therefore have to be revisited from their roots, in the element of the possible, since responsibility may well, depending on the context, take very different forms.
If the problem is considered on the basis of the two paradoxes we have encountered – necessary but insufficient support from the will; implication of a relationship to objective knowledge and need for a modal questioning of this knowledge – we can immediately open two axes of questioning:
These two axes converge to highlight the contingent context in which responsibility must be exercised today. This contingency gives its own tone to the present time, with its concerns, promises and deadlocks.
Addressing the issue through the modal prism requires a specific method that can be called “regressive”. It is difficult to characterize the term “upstream” as it will be used here. Neither ontological nor spatial, barely temporal, not really energetic, it refers to the ability to grasp a reality while it is still latent. Modally, it is a question of going back from the necessary to the real, and from there to the possible, seeing in this return a gradual enrichment and a freedom9. Opening the possible to its viability, identifying gaps between conditions, also means that possibility and necessity are not separated and side-by-side (as in the classic position of a Leibniz who opposes the necessary truths to the contingent truths). Faced with the apparent need for a univocal set of conditions, we need to go back upstream to understand that this need is conventional (linked to a saturated perspective, but in reality too narrow). Undoing the sets of conditions that are given as necessary means broadening possibilities and therefore cultivating freedoms.
This approach is defined in relation to the “analytical” method, which it certainly does not aim to disqualify or replace, but which it is intended to complement. Under the word “analytical”, it is necessary to read a method based on distinctions, which seeks to deploy the richness of a term by exposing its different aspects, in order to remove ambiguities that could arise and compromise its use10.
An example of the analytical concept of responsibility is provided in a recent book by Sophie Pellé and Bernard Reber. The authors distinguish ten meanings of the word “responsibility”:
This is the entire list, which is, to my knowledge, the most complete available in the literature11. The analytical approach gives very fine distinctions, which can help in the effective application of categories. In contrast, a “regressive” method is interested in the implementation of distinctions, as it emerges, upstream. It does not seek to give the multiple meanings of responsibility, but to identify the conditions for its implementation. This is its dimension of effectiveness. Thus a defined perspective is established: responsibility concerns that which, in a deliberation, alone or with others, is neither the application of a procedure nor the result of a will, good or bad, but ethical freedom12, i.e. effectiveness13.
The regressive method “goes up” the slope, not towards the complex meaning of a word but towards the possible involved in this complexity and at work in the situation where the reader is involved. Generally speaking, it is a question of going back upstream from the apparently necessary determination in order to restore it to its contingency and to its conventionality. The conditions are therefore not simply “objective”, nor are they met as already constituted. They define each other in a relationship lived within the context.
Since, in a book, you have to start with words, we will start by developing some terms. The categories take the sense explained here each time they are used. The meaning they take with other philosophers only comes into play when expressly stated.
The method used and the decision adopted on modal reform are therefore closely linked. The method goes back, from the knowledge we have of various objects, considered as acquired and definitive, to an increasingly conventional dimension of reality of these objects, until we recognize their radical contingency. Conventional does not oppose “objective” but redefines an objectivity too naively taken in a simple dualism with the “subjective”.
Can a thought of responsibility assume effective responsibility? I suggest that this can be tested on the very topical issue of a thoughtful meeting between Europe, North America and China.
A meeting can be both a mutual enrichment and a relationship of alienation in one way or another. The place of the meeting is decisive in this respect. If we could identify a suitable speculative place for a fruitful meeting, the achievements relating to the question of responsibility could be validated. The methodological precautions relating to this second moment will be developed in the introduction to Part Two. We will limit ourselves here to stressing that the meeting could be based on the concept of a process. This will require many precautions that will be discussed in detail. The challenge, which interests Europe as well as North America and China, is to stress that China's contribution is not limited to the question of “inner wisdom”. Indeed, its thinkers can also offer political wisdom, oriented towards engagement in the world, which speaks to us today. This is true even if they “also” include this dimension of a meditative interiority, which finds its way into a speculative development.
Since the notion of the process has been particularly central to the development of China's traditions of thought, this will be an opportunity to discuss some aspects of them, in a test of the generality of what has been advanced here [JUL 07]. It may also be an opportunity to distinguish between several types of ethical structures in a process.
All this encourages the thinker to turn to China. But the main argument in favor of this detour is the absence, in classical China, of a watertight partitioning between disciplines (which was only adopted in China in the 20th Century14). This implies the absence of a clear separation between “domains” of knowledge, each science being responsible for its own. Understanding the order of Heaven and learning to behave, and therefore to respect this order, are not two separate studies. This is in stark contrast to the watertight separation of the domains of knowledge already strongly expressed in Aristotle, and which triumphed in the Kantian revolution. How can we think of a non-separation of the theoretical and the practical, thus a mutual enrichment of one another, and a progressive enlargement achieved by their reconciliation?
What is particularly interesting for the theme before us is that this distant context thus makes it possible to reconsider the relationship between ethics and knowledge, and therefore between prescription and description. It is not a question of comparative reading, which would bring texts from both worlds face to face in order to seek differences and convergences. Starting from an internal reading, on the Chinese side, we want to see how the registers of upright behavior and knowledge of Heaven-Earth interact. Once they are no longer separated, but closely interrelated, the two themes can be questioned, upstream of a whole series of determinations that locked them in a non-relationship. But all this will be specified in the introduction to the second part of this book, where this reflection will take place.
The very rich thinking of the process and the absence of a tight separation between the different fields of knowledge are therefore the two reasons why a detour to classical China is required.
The third part of the book will aim to test the scope of the conclusions reached in the first two. It will do so in relation to an expression that today is often more of a slogan, ideology or myth than a patiently developed concept. It is the “Invisible Hand”, which is proudly traced back to Adam Smith, even if the expression appears only three times in his entire work and is not, by any means, elucidated as a concept.
This expression condenses much of the legitimacy of what can be called neoliberalism: that is, economic liberalism engaged in a phase of expansion, through the transposition of its methods into other fields of action, for example in the field of public15 governance.
Can we, on the basis of the categories introduced and developed here, involved in ethical thinking about the process, demystify the “Invisible Hand” and examine its theoretical core in order to test its normative dimension? After all, it does play a normative role in the discourse of neoliberals, since obstacles to competition are often presented as obstacles to the “freedom” of actors.
I would like to thank Bernard Reber and Robert Gianni for their comments and Nicolas Bouleau for reviewing the beginning of Part 3.