From the early days of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI), luck has played the role of an antagonist to responsibility: responsible innovation is, in part, an effort to control for the possible negative effects of luck–the chance that chance itself will take our technologies in directions that we would rather avoid. If we are to have innovations that are socially desirable and ethically acceptable, it seems, we must prevent bad luck by controlling for uncertainty wherever we can. This control-based approach has, however, proven to be impossible, with consequences for the practice of research, for the institutions that fund and guide research directions, and for how we as a society conceive of the potential for responsible research to deal well with the uncertainties of our contemporary and future world. This special issue of the Journal of Responsible Innovation tackles the relationship between responsibility and luck head on, with authors providing assessments and potential solutions for the problems that luck creates, for how researchers conceive of their own responsibilities, how institutions can be more responsible toward research itself, and how we can take luck up into our innovation practices in a productive way.

Scientific discoveries are often to some degree influenced by luck. Whether luck’s influence is at odds with common-sense intuitions about responsibility, is the central concern of the philosophical debate about moral luck. Do scientists acknowledge that luck plays a role in their work and–if so–do they consider it morally problematic? The present article discusses the results of four focus groups with scientists, who were asked about their views on luck in their fields and its moral implications. The participants underscored circumstantial luck as a key dimension of luck in science. Nevertheless, most participants insisted that there are ways of executing ‘control’ in science: They believe that virtues and skills can increase one’s chances for success. The cultivation of these skills and virtues was considered a reasonable ground for pride. Prizes and rewards were rarely tied to personal desert, but instead to their societal function.

The world has been startled by the irresponsible experiment of He Jiankui, who used CRISPR to genetically modify human embryos. In this viewpoint, we explore the phenomenon of moral luck in medicine and its bearing on the limits of simple judgements of the kind “everything that ends well is well” or “someone broke the rules, and is therefore blameworthy”. The risks involved in scientific and medical experiments are often brushed aside, when they turn out well. The clinical application of CRISPR in the human germline is presently too risky to be used without more preclinical research and unacceptable without broader societal support, which justifies the call for a moratorium by the scientific community. However, such policies do not determine how to assess cases, where someone was willing to take such risks beyond all rules, guidelines and regulation and succeeds. The policies including the proposed moratorium are as unanimous about the undesirability of current applications of clinical germline editing as they are about the potential importance of this research. What if this potential is achieved by breaking the rules? The paradox of moral luck impinges on this debate. In our analysis, we rebut simplified judgments and advocate a more balanced view on the relation between moral responsibility and the societal consequences of medicine.

The notion of responsible innovation suggests that innovators carry additional responsibilities (to society, stakeholders, users) beyond those commonly suggested. In this paper, we will discuss the meaning of these novel responsibilities focusing on two philosophical problems of attributing such responsibilities to innovators. The first is the allocation of responsibilities to innovators. Innovation is a process that involves a multiplicity of agents and unpredictable, far-reaching causal chains from innovation to social impacts, which creates great uncertainty. A second problem is constituted by possible trade-offs between different kinds of responsibility. It is evident that attributing backward-looking responsibility for product failures diminishes the willingness to learn about such defects and to take forward-looking responsibility. We will argue that these problems can be overcome by elaborating what it is exactly that innovators are responsible for. In this manner, we will distinguish more clearly between holding responsible and taking responsibility. This opens a space for ‘supererogatory’ responsibilities. Second, we will argue that both innovation processes and outcomes can be objects of innovators’ responsibility. Third, we will analyze different kinds of responsibility (blameworthiness, accountability, liability, obligation and virtue) and show that the functions of their attribution are not necessarily contradictory. Based on this conceptual refinement, we will argue that accountability, responsibility-as-virtue and the willingness to take responsibility are crucial for responsible innovation.

Innovation processes are extremely complex and opaque, which makes it tough or even impossible to govern them. Innovators lack control of large parts of these developments and lack of foreknowledge about the possible consequences of emerging technologies. Because of these features some scholars have argued that innovation processes should be structurally reformed and the agent-centered model of responsibility for innovation should be dismissed altogether. In the present article it will be argued that such a structural idea of responsible research and innovation presumes rational agents who can be motivated by reasons. Instead of dismissing the agent-centered approach to responsibility for innovation processes a virtue ethical approach will be developed. Virtues should be considered as the intellectual and moral dispositions presumed for good decision making. It will be shown that creativity and eagerness are creditable character traits that have a distinct positive value for managing the opaqueness of innovation processes. Such traits are mandatory for change and betterment. Furthermore, it will be argued that the notion of responsibility of innovators should not be understood merely as means for constraining them but also as a tool to perpetuate their integrity and happiness. Through discussing the captivating examples of Steve Jobs and the protagonist of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein it will be shown how to apply this virtue ethical framework for innovators in practice.

Dementia is highly prevalent and up until now, still incurable. If we may believe the narrative that is currently dominant in dementia research, in the future we will not have to suffer from dementia anymore, as there will be a simple techno-fix solution. It is just a matter of time before we can solve the growing public health problem of dementia. In this paper we take a critical stance towards overly positive narratives of techno-fixes by placing our empirical analysis of dementia research protocols and political statements in a framework of technology assessment. From this perspective, it becomes obvious that a techno-fix is just one of many ways to approach societal problems and more importantly that technologies are way less perfect than they are presented. We will argue that this narrow scope, which focusses on the usual suspects for solving illnesses, reduces dementia to organismic aspects, and may be counterproductive in finding a cure for dementia. We conclude with outlining how the narrow scope can be balanced with other narratives and why we should have a reasonable scepticism towards the usual suspects.

The number of publications that highlight the influence of visions and futuristic narratives on the development of emerging technologies increases. Toolboxes such as “Hermeneutical Technology Assessment” and “Vision Assessment” provide methodological considerations on how to assess techno-futuristic narratives, their proponents, and their impact on technological development. Because of their contributions to the technoscientific discourse, a special responsibility for technological processes is attributed to the “visioneers” of such narratives. While such a claim naturally follows from an agential role in a process, it is not clear whether visioneers should be held responsible. Some problems of this attribution will be addressed in the present paper. Particularly the following questions will be considered: Which role does autonomy play for responsibility? Is causation sufficient for the attribution of responsibility? Which role do intentions and alternatives play for the responsibility of visioneers? These questions will be discussed against the backdrop of contemporary approaches to the responsibility of visioneering and classic philosophical works in the field. Furthermore, the problem of accountability will be considered. Socio-technical systems are highly complex, which makes it hard to trace back the origins of particular developments. It will be argued that it is currently unreasonable to give visioneers the status of an important player. The article will shed light on the several dimensions of responsibility and provide a more nuanced understanding of responsibility in the context of new and emerging technologies.