Responsible innovation for decent nonliberal peoples: a dilemma?

ABSTRACT

It is hard to disagree with the idea of responsible innovation (henceforth, RI), as it enables policy-makers, scientists, technology developers, and the public to better understand and respond to the social, ethical, and policy challenges raised by new and emerging technologies. RI has gained prominence in the policy agenda in Europe and the United States over the last few years. And, along with its rising importance in policy-making, there is also a burgeoning research literature on the topic. Given the historical context from which RI emerges, it should not be surprising that the current discourse on RI is predominantly based on liberal democratic values. Yet, the bias towards liberal democratic values will inevitably limit the discussion of RI, especially in the cases where liberal democratic values are not taken for granted. As such, there is an urgent need to return to the normative foundation of RI, and to explore the notion of ‘responsible innovation’ from nonliberal democratic perspectives. Against this background, this paper seeks to demonstrate the problematic consequences of RI solely grounded on or justified by liberal democratic values. This paper will cast the argument in the form of a dilemma to be labelled as The Decent Nonliberal Peoples’ Dilemma and use it to illustrate the problems of the Western bias.

KEYWORDS:

• Responsible innovation
• liberal democracy
• decent nonliberal peoples
• dilemma

Acknowledgement

An early version of this paper was presented at the Climate Engineering Conference 2014 with the title ‘Responsible Innovation and the Danger of Technological Imperialism: A Case of Climate Engineering’. The author wants to thank the audiences for insightful comments. The author would also like to thank Steve Rayner, Tom Wang and the colleagues at the Department of Social Science, Hang Seng Management College, for extensive discussions on the ideas in the paper. Thanks also go to the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions to improve the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Pak-Hang Wong is a Lecturer at Department of Social Science, Hang Seng Management College. His research interests are in philosophy of technology, ethics of technology, responsible innovation, and STS. Previously, he was a Research Fellow at the Institute for Science, Innovation, and Society in the University of Oxford, working on the social, ethical, and policy issues of climate change and climate engineering. He is the co-editor of Well-Being in Contemporary Society (2015, Springer), and his research is published in Philosophy & Technology, Zygon, Science and Engineering Ethics, Dao, and other academic journals.

Notes

1. For a historical overview of the idea of RI and related ideas, see Owen, Macnaghten, and Stilgoe (2012) and Stilgoe, Owen, and Macnaghten (2013). Also, see Davis and Laas (2014) for a comparison between the notion of ‘broader impacts’ in the American context and the notion of ‘responsible research and innovation’ in the European context.

2. For example, the Journal of Responsible Innovation is established in 2014 to devote to RI, see Guston et al. (2014) for the rationales to start a journal on RI. Also, see Owen, Bessant, and Heintz (2013), van den Hoven et al. (2014), and Koops et al. (2015) for some examples of recent work on RI.

3. There are multiple ways to construe the ‘liberal democratic values’ and interpret ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’. In this paper, I view them primarily via the liberal democratic notion of personhood, that is, persons are viewed as independent, rational, and self-determining beings, who are the best and only candidates to determine their own course of life. Accordingly, individuals ought to be consulted and given justifications for any decisions that interfere with their ways of life, and their voices too ought to be weighted equally because individuals are seen as equal counterparts. Nussbaum succinctly points out that

at the heart of [the liberal democratic] tradition is a twofold intuition about human beings: namely, that all, just by being human, are of equal dignity and worth, no matter where they are situated in society, and that the primary source of this worth is a power of moral choice within them, a power that consists in the ability to plan a life in accordance with one’s own evaluation of ends … [T]he moral equality of persons gives them a fair claim to certain types of treatment of debate within the tradition, but the shared starting point is that this treatment must do two closely related things. It must respect and promote the liberty of choice, and it must respect and promote the equal worth of persons as choosers. (1999, 57)

Following Nussbaum, I take freedom (as non-interference) and equality as the core values of liberal democratic worldview, and (public) participation is a manifestation of these values.

4. Of course, it too depends on the claim that liberal democratic values are not the only legitimate values to justify a political system. Indeed, if proponents of liberal democratic values insist those are the only legitimate values, then they might reject the consequences I illustrate as ‘problematic’. I shall return to this briefly when I discuss the possible responses to the dilemma.

5. This is not to assert the ‘Western’ bias is the only – or, even the most important – problem in the discussion of RI, for example, Blok and Lemmens (2015) have offered an important critique of the understanding of ‘innovation’ in the current conceptualisation of ‘responsible innovation’; however, I believe the ‘Western’ bias will be one of the major challenges to RI if it is to have a global significance.

6. In The Laws of Peoples, Rawls’ focuses on one form of decent nonliberal states, that is, decent hierarchical societies, but he did not deny the possibility of other forms of decent nonliberal states (see, e.g. Rawls 1999, 4). In this paper, I shall use the term ‘decent nonliberal states’ to include all forms of decent societies that are not liberal democratic in nature.

7. For a more extensive discussion of the relation between public participation and the liberal democratic view of personhood, see Wong (2013).

8. A similar account of RI, which too is based on the European values, is provided by van den Hoven et al. (2013, 23–24).

9. It is worth noting that the terms for the four dimensions are ‘anticipation’, ‘reflexivity’, ‘inclusion’, and ‘responsiveness’ in Stilgoe, Owen, and Macnaghten (2013), thus are different from the terms used by Owen et al. (2013), but their explanation for the four dimensions does not differ notably.

10. Stirling (2005) has summarised the three rationales for public participation (or public deliberation) as ‘normative’, ‘instrumental’, and ‘substantive’, that is, ‘[f]rom a normative view, participation is just the right thing to do. From an instrumental perspective, it is a better way to achieve particular ends. In substantive terms, it leads to better ends’ (Stirling 2005, 220, emphasis in the original). It is, however, unclear why public participation is in itself a (morally) right thing to do. For Stirling, it is because public participation satisfies

Habermasian principles of ‘ideal speech’, with Rawlsian notions of ‘public reason’ and with a multitude of derived evaluative criteria held ideally to be associated with effective engagement in social appraisal. […] In short, under [the] normative democratic view, participation is self-evidently a good thing in its own right, without the need for further justification. (Stirling 2005, 221)

However, Stirling has not discussed whether this applies when liberal democratic values are not favoured by the public.

11. Machin (2012) argues that Rawls’s formulation of decent consultation hierarchy does not satisfy the requirement of horizontal equality because it does not represent individuals qua individuals, but he too points out that if it can be adequately modified to represent individuals qua individuals, then it will satisfy the requirement. In this paper, the specific details about decent consultation hierarchy are irrelevant; what is important is that there are nonliberal democratic political systems that are as legitimate as liberal democratic political systems.

12. One notable exception is Arnaldi et al. (2015).

13. The will of the people, in turn, (re)presents the will of heaven, which is the ultimate source of (political) authority. For an overview of the idea of Minben in Confucian political philosophy, see Wang and Titunik (2000).

14. Arnaldi et al. use the term ‘responsible governance’ to refer broadly to any approaches to governance of science and technology that emphasize responsibility in science and technology and focus on the social issues raised by science and technology (2015, 81–82). Hence, their idea of ‘responsible governance’ should be differentiated from RI (and various approaches to RI), which provides specific accounts of such responsibility and of the normative relation(s) between science and technology and society.

15. Accordingly, it can also be argued that the normative ground for the introduction for public participation and public deliberation is stability (or, harmony), which is one of the major traditional values in Chinese society (Ma, Zhao, and Liao 2015).

16. The imperialistic concerns to be described are akin to the concerns articulated by cultural imperialism, that is, imposition of presumed superior values through various cultural means. However, as an anonymous reviewer points out, the term can also be interpreted through militaristic imperialism. In this section, these two understandings of imperialistic concerns correspond to the two ways of which liberal democratic values could be imposed from outside.

17. A possible exception to this claim is when the research or technology in question could produce transboundary (negative) effects, for example, cross-boundary pollution, in which case (direct) intervention and international sanctions become less morally problematic as the research or technology causes harms to third-parties, and therefore it is no longer merely an issue of the good, but the right (and the just).

18. Alternatively, the ‘plurality of good life’ can be illustrated with Rawls’ ‘the fact of reasonable pluralism,’ that is, ‘a pluralism of comprehensive religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines [and, more importantly,] a pluralism of incompatible yet reasonable comprehensive doctrines’ (1993, xvi). Given the reasonableness of the comprehensive doctrines, it seems unjustified to reject other’s comprehensive doctrines in favour of one’s own.

19. Denial of access to crucial research data sets might be an exaggerated example, a more likely scenario will be about access to international and/or collaborative research funding requires the applicants to observe the values and/or procedures and practices prescribed by the funding agencies. In either scenario, the researchers and technology developers could be barred from the research resources if they do not conform to the values (or procedure(s) and practice(s)).

20. There is an important question as to whether it is indeed possible to have a standard (or, a set of procedures) representing a specific set of values, for example, liberal democratic values. This is an important question for those who are in favour of standardisation in RI, but it has little implication to my argument. What is important to my argument is that standard(s) of RI is (are) not neutral, and standardisation inevitably imposes foreign values through institutionalisation.

21. In addition to the charge of relativism, those who incline towards this position will also have to answer the arguments from the proponents of global democracy and cosmopolitanism.