Process, outcomes, virtues: the normative strategies of responsible research and innovation and the challenge of moral pluralism

The paper analyses the normative foundations of responsibility in the recent literature on responsible research and innovation (RRI). Firstly, it finds that RRI approaches invoke three main types of moral reasoning to define responsibility corresponding to key philosophical traditions: proceduralism, consequentialism and virtue ethics. The paper analyses how RRI approaches differ in the kind of elements they borrow from these three traditions. Secondly, the paper shows that this analytical reflection about the normative strategies followed by RRI approaches helps to better understand the tension existing between, on the one hand, the modern requirement of pluralism in democratic societies to allow for various value systems to influence the decision-making process and, on the other, the applicability of normative theories that demands specific and practical norms to be identified. The paper aims to show how each type of moral reasoning strategy used by most RRI approaches deals with this tension and how each attempts to resolve it.