title: Turning the tide or surfing the wave? Responsible Research and Innovation, fundamental rights and neoliberal virtues.
abstract: The notion of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) has increasingly attracted attention in the academic literature. Up until now, however, the literature has focused on clarifying the principles for which research and innovation are responsible and on examining the conditions that account for managing them responsibly. Little attention has been reserved to exploring the political-economic context in which the notion of RRI has become progressively more prominent. This article tries to address this aspect and suggests some preliminary considerations on the connections between the specific understanding of responsibility in RRI and the framing of responsibility in what has been synthetically defined as 'neoliberalism'. To do so, we try to illustrate how the idea of responsibility has evolved over time so that the specific characteristics of RRI can be better highlighted. These characteristics will then be discussed against the features of neoliberalism and its understanding of responsibility. Eventually, we reaffirm a view of RRI centred on fundamental rights as a possible point of departure between these two perspectives on responsibility.
authors.affiliation: Interdepartmental Centre for Environmental, Ethical, Legal and Social Decisions on Emerging Technologies (CIGA), University of Padua, Padua, Italy. simone.arnaldi@unipd.it.
authors.forename: Simone
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Arnaldi
authors.affiliation: Interdepartmental Centre for Environmental, Ethical, Legal and Social Decisions on Emerging Technologies (CIGA), University of Padua, Padua, Italy.|Department of Political Science, Law and International Studies, University of Padua, Padua, Italy.
authors.forename: Guido
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Gorgoni
mesh_terms: D035843:Biomedical Research / Q000941:ethics*; D032984:Ethics, Research; D005060:Europe; D006806:Human Rights; D006801:Humans; D012109:Research Support as Topic
keywords: Agency; Fundamental rights; Moral Entrepreneurship; Neoliberalism; Responsibility paradigms; Responsible Research and Innovation