The concept of RRI has emerged as a new framework to be used by the European Commission for research projects. It now lies at the core of the Horizon 2020 programme and is designed to replace current assessment practices focused on ethical review. The book will analyse the shift from ethical review to RRI: what remains of the former, what has been gained? Secondly, it makes a critical presentation of existing ethical reviews from the perspectives of moral philosophy and the philosophy of technology. It discusses conceptions of ethical assessment on different levels. Thirdly, this book presents the RRI pillars presented by the European commission, together with their possible relationships to different governance models. Moreover, existing academic literature on RRI, which is not yet extensive, is growing rapidly. Various frameworks highlighting the dimensions of and conditions for responsible research and innovation have been proposed to define RRI. However, in spite of a well-established tradition on the subject in moral theory and philosophy, none of these approaches has investigated the concept of responsibility in depth. Fourthly, and for this reason, the book will provide an analysis of various meanings of responsibility that have been identified in moral theory and will discuss their relevance for RRI in different contexts. It will defend a pluralist approach to responsibility and explore several combinations of responsibilities depending on how these responsibilities are shared in a given context. The book adopts both a theoretical and a practical approach by assessing different participatory devices and analysing a number of research cases.
