The old-new meaning of the researcher's responsibility.

Abstract

If the technological situation is unique, the ways to understand the contemporary moral condition are not. We link it to age-old questions: in fact, the power promised by technol- ogy only establishes a new form of human finitude. In the face of this continuity of the fundamental moral condition, we examine a number of alternative ways of thinking about the basis of responsible innovation, exploring the metaphors of quasi-parental and political responsibilities, as well as the place of virtue in innovation and the role of cul- tural narratives in helping us understand the limits of responsible innovation. The problem of responsible innovation stems from a contradiction that af- fects the social authority possessed by scientific knowledge. This is the con- tradiction between the promise of knowledge without intrinsic limits, and the limits that actually emerge when the products of this knowledge, in the form of technology, generate radical uncertainty about the future. Human desire is yet another part of the human condition that also possesses no in- trinsic limits. Unconstrained by the voice of reason, passions can reinforce themselves with unbounded strength for an indefinite period of time. They provoke emotions, whose contribution to moral judgement stands on a par with the input of a consequentialist calculation of costs and benefits associ- ated with one's action. Hence the necessity to take them into account in ad- dressing the problems of responsible innovation. The 20 th century was replete with reflections and reactions on what was perceived as the failed promises of rational science and the enlightened man. From the Holocaust and the Gulag on the social side, to Chernobyl, Fuku- shima, the debacle of GMOs, intrusions of privacy, and contaminated medi- cines (from haemophilia blood products in the 1980s to cardiac drugs in the 2010s) on the technological side, all of these catastrophic events involved the unforeseen consequences of technological innovation as either leading vec- tors or helpful mediators of evil. The psychological and moral experiences that these events induced in human societies had a traumatic character (Frankl 1946), in which the claims of a trusted authority were unexpectedly