Responsibility and Freedom

5Framework for the Ethical Assessment of RRI

After having understood how responsibility and freedom are tightly connected through an ethical framework, we can now return to the point from where we started and try to make a different assessment on Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI). We can say that we have detranscendentalized Kantian’s reason and its subjectivity by placing it into an external, real dimension. We have detranscendentalized the subject of reason to discover that at the basis of it there is freedom and so now we can transcendentalize freedom and the responsibility related to it. The transcendental role of freedom can be easily expressed if we take the words of Habermas. The German philosopher explicitly refers to communication but the description suits our conceptualization where the quasi-transcendental reference is instead freedom. Habermas said [HAB 15]:

“Regard the transcendental achievements as being realized only in the performative acts of subjects capable of speech and action and in the social and cultural structures of their life-worlds. For them, apart from the subjective mind there is only the objective mind left, which materializes itself in communication, work and interaction, in appliances and artifacts, in the living out of individual life stories and in the network of socio-cultural forms of life. But in the process, reason does not lose the transcendental power of spontaneously projecting world-disclosing horizons. This “creative” power ...