From Responsible Research and Innovation to Responsibility by Design

open access articleDrawing on more than eight years working to implement Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) in the Human Brain Project, a large EU-funded research project that brings together neuroscience, computing, social sciences, and the humanities, and one of the largest investments in RRI in one project, this article offers insights on RRI and explores its possible future. We focus on the question of how RRI can have long-lasting impact and persist beyond the time horizon of funded projects. For this purpose, we suggest the concept of “responsibility by design” which is intended to encapsulate the idea of embedding RRI in research and innovation in a way that makes it part of the fabric of the resulting outcomes, in our case, a distributed European Research Infrastructure

Mutual affordances: the dynamics between social media and populism

In a recent contribution to this journal Paolo Gerbaudo has argued that an ‘elective affinity’ exists between social media and populism. The present article expands on Gerbaudo’s argument and examines various dimensions of this affinity in further detail. It argues that it is helpful to conceptually reframe the proposed affinity in terms of affordances. Four affordances are identified which make the social media ecology relatively favourable to both-right as well as left-wing populism, compared to the pre-social media ecology. These affordances are neither stable nor uniquely fixed: they change in concordance with ongoing technological developments and in response to political events. Even though these dynamics can be quick-moving, a fairly stable alliance of interests between social media and populism seems to have emerged over the last decade. This raises the plausibility that as long as the current social media ecology persists, populist tendencies will remain prevalent in politics

What are socially disruptive technologies?

Scholarly discourse on “disruptive technologies” has been strongly influenced by disruptive innovation theory. This theory is tailored for analyzing disruptions in markets and business. It is of limited use, however, in analyzing the broader social, moral and existential dynamics of technosocial disruption. Yet these broader dynamics should be of great scholarly concern, both in coming to terms with technological disruptions of the past and those of our current age. Technologies can disrupt social relations, institutions, epistemic paradigms, foundational concepts, values, and even the nature of human cognition and experience – domains of disruption that are largely neglected in existing discourse on disruptive technologies. Accordingly, this paper seeks to reorient scholarly discussion around a broader notion of technosocial disruption. This broader notion raises three foundational questions. First, how can technosocial disruption be conceptualized in a way that clearly sets it apart from the disruptive innovation framework? Secondly, how does the notion of technosocial disruption relate to the concordant notions of “disruptor” and “disruptiveness”? Thirdly, can we advance criteria to assess the “degree of social disruptiveness” of different technologies? The paper clarifies these questions and proposes an answer to each of them. In doing so, it advances “technosocial disruption” as a key analysandum for future scholarship on the interactions between technology and society

Wellbeing, Place and Technology

One of the strengths of a capability account of wellbeing is that it allows us to theoretically and empirically analyze at a quite practical level why certain things matter to people - such as their housing, their jobs, and their friendships. A capability account of wellbeing is also very well suited to understand the importance of place for wellbeing. Some dimensions of wellbeing are constitutively place-related, such as “feeling at home”. Other dimensions of wellbeing are affected by what the places and locations in which we live mean to us. Taken together, we call them “place-based capabilities”. Using a capability account of wellbeing allows us to use social scientific research to investigate the role of social, economic, demographic, political, ecological and technological processes on wellbeing. This paper illustrates this by investigating the role of recent technologies in enabling and expanding capabilities. On the one hand, technological change has dramatically expanded those capabilities. On the other hand, the use of those technologies has unintended consequences for other capabilities. The conceptual as well as empirical relationships between (place-based) capabilities and technology is therefore a complex one

Why Limitarianism?

This article discusses ‘limitarianism’, which in its most general formulation is the idea that in the world as it is, no one should have more than a certain upper limit of valuable goods, in particular, income and wealth. What, if anything, does ‘limitarianism’ add to normative political philosophy? In Section I, I describe the context in which limitarianism has been introduced. Section II will provide a more detailed statement about limitarianism, including some more recent contributions to and developments in the literature. In the next two sections, I discuss egalitarianism (Section III) and sufficientarianism (Section IV) and ask whether they can do what I envision to be the task of limitarianism. Section V argues that within theories of distributive justice, limitarianism is best seen as part of a pluralist account. This is illustrated by sketching the proposal of a pluralist account combining sufficientarianism, opportunity egalitarianism, and limitarianism. Section VI concludes by pulling everything together, and will give an answer to the question of what limitarianism contributes to normative political philosophy

Conceptualising Well-being for Autistic Persons

In the philosophy of well-being, there is hardly anything written on the lives of people with autism or on the question whether existing philosophical theories of well-being are suited for understanding how well the lives of autistic persons are going. This paper tries to make some progress towards filling this gap. I start by giving a concise account of autism, which highlights the huge heterogeneity among autistics. I discuss some basic features of autism, ask whether there are good reasons why we would need an account of well-being specifically for autistics and what philosophical well-being research could learn from being informed by autistic experiences and phenomenology. I then investigate to what extent the capability approach gives us a helpful theory of well-being for autistics, and what looking through an autism-lens can contribute to the further development of the capabilitarian well-being. In particular, I show that some capabilities that are crucially relevant for autistics are also relevant for the lives of non-autistic people. The final part of the paper looks at an important difficulty in using the capabilitarian account of well-being for autistics, namely: should the normative focus be on achievements (functionings) or real opportunities (capabilities)?

Defending the Democratic Argument for Limitarianism: A Reply to Volacu and Dumitru

In this paper, I argue that limitarian policies are a good means to further political equality. Limitarianism, which is a view coined and defended by Robeyns (2017), is a partial view in distributive justice which claims that under non-ideal circumstances it is morally impermissible to be rich. In a recent paper, Volacu and Dumitru (2018) level two arguments against Robeyns’ Democratic Argument for limitarianism. The Democratic Argument states that limitarianism is called for given the undermining influence current inequalities in income and wealth have for the value of democracy and political equality. Volacu and Dumitru’s Incentive Objection holds that limitarianism places an excessive and inefficient burden on the rich in ensuring political equality. The Efficacy Objection holds that even if limitarianism limits excessive wealth it still fails to ensure the preservation of political equality. In this paper, I will argue that both of these objections fail, but on separate grounds. I argue that the Incentive objection fails because one could appeal to limitarian policies that are different from the ones discussed by Volacu and Dumitru and which escape the problem of reduced productivity. I argue against the Efficacy Objection that limitarian policies are a partial but highly valuable step towards establishing political equality, and that they can and should complement or be complemented by other strategies