Logic of Choice or Logic of Care? Uncertainty, Technological Mediation and Responsible Innovation

The regulation of innovation reflects a specific imaginary of the role of governance that makes it external to the field it governs. It is argued that this decision and rule-based view of regulation is insufficient to deal with the inescapable uncertainties that are produced by innovation. In particular, using risk-based knowledge as the basis of regulation fails to deal sufficiently both with the problem that innovation ensures the future will not resemble the past, and with the problem that the social priorities that underlie innovation often remain unquestioned. Recently, rights-based frameworks have been defended as principle-based approaches to innovation governance that address the gaps which trouble an understanding of regulation as based on risk-based decision procedures. An alternative, care-based view of governance is defended, in which institutional and practice change, aimed at the creation of specific institutional ‘virtues’ and rooted in the broad and deep participation of publics in shaping innovation is seen as an appropriate way of making governance internal to innovation. Introduction Responsible research and innovation (RRI) has been proposed as an answer to a perceived crisis in the contract between technoscience and society, one which aims to effect a values-based transformation in how emerging technologies, and innovation as such, is governed. This normative stance has been characterised as ‘taking care of the future’ [46]. From this perspective on the purpose of innovation, better regulation in the face of the uncertain risks and ignorance that come with technological novelty requires not better rules, but will instead require changes to practices, and therefore to the institutions that sustain them and to the social relationships built around them. Regulation must therefore shift modes, leaving behind the assumption that governance is external to the ‘object’ it governs and needs to be exercised from a centralised position built on supposedly disembedded knowledge. It must instead be translated into transformed into ‘softer’ forms of governance re-embedded in social concerns and priorities. This implies a new set of responsible and responsive relationships between technoscientific ‘enactors’ and ‘selectors’ [1], as well as requiring a redistribution of agency to create other selectors from among publics who have perhaps been hitherto excluded from this position. In this article, I argue that the use of a concept of ‘care’ here is not just adventitious, and nor does it transpose regulatory debates into the realm of ‘values’, of motherhood and apple pie. Drawing on the ethics of care, and some examples of the ways in which care has been employed in science and technology studies (STS), I propose that RRI should be viewed as a practice-based and therefore also virtuesor dispositions-based concept of regulation that acknowledges several often overlooked aspects of the human relationship with technology. Not only does a care-based conception of RRI affirm the more-than-instrumental role of technology in human life, it also recognises the multiplicity of pragmatic, ethical and aesthetic values that inform human responses to technologies. I proceed by examining the crisis in the relationship between technological societies and technoscience, which I