Responsibility and Freedom: The Ethical Realm of RRI

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.

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.