Sophie Pell – författare

The scientific and technological upheavals of the 20th Century and the questions and difficulties that went along with them (climate change, nuclear energy, GMO, etc.) have increased the necessity of thinking about and formalizing technoscientific progress and its consequences. Expert evaluations and ethics committees today cannot be the only legitimate sources for understanding the social acceptability and desirability of this progress. Responsibility must be shared out on a wider scale, as much in society as in the process of research and innovation projects.

This book presents the main works of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) from a moral responsibility point of view, for which it calls upon no fewer than 10 understandings to bring out those which are positive and to support an interpretive and combinatory pluralism. In this sense, it demonstrates moral innovation. It analyzes numerous cases and proposes perspectives that are rarely discussed in this emerging field (current practices of ethical evaluation, concerns of the integrity of research, means for participatory technological evaluation, etc.). It contributes to the pledges of RRI, which largely remains theoretically undetermined even though it reorganizes the relationships between science, innovation and society.

The scientific and technological upheavals of the 20th Century and the questions and difficulties that went along with them (climate change, nuclear energy, GMO, etc.) have increased the necessity of thinking about and formalizing technoscientific progress and its consequences. Expert evaluations and ethics committees today cannot be the only legitimate sources for understanding the social acceptability and desirability of this progress. Responsibility must be shared out on a wider scale, as much in society as in the process of research and innovation projects.

This book presents the main works of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) from a moral responsibility point of view, for which it calls upon no fewer than 10 understandings to bring out those which are positive and to support an interpretive and combinatory pluralism. In this sense, it demonstrates moral innovation. It analyzes numerous cases and proposes perspectives that are rarely discussed in this emerging field (current practices of ethical evaluation, concerns of the integrity of research, means for participatory technological evaluation, etc.). It contributes to the pledges of RRI, which largely remains theoretically undetermined even though it reorganizes the relationships between science, innovation and society.

Responsible Innovation.  For some, this expression is only an oxymoron or, worse, a means of masking with a sheet of virtue economic practices that would otherwise appear selfish and self-interested. For others, theorists and actors of innovation, this expression represents a formidable lever of action and a rich conceptual source from which to draw new ways of innovating.

The articulation between different levels of norms – economic and ethical, to which we can add the legal dimension – is not new, and is the subject of an in-depth reflection, decades old, around the idea of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). By taking up some debates on CSR, most of which are foreign to the current authors of responsible innovation, this book examines the various justifications that CSR brings in order to convince economic players, subject to powerful market forces, of their responsible commitment. But these are not enough. The book also explores the specific contribution of the concept of responsible innovation to coping with the technological, social and political breakthroughs generated by innovation, and is based on philosophical resources such as the ethics of virtue and the ethics of “care”.