Responsible Research and Innovation appears as a paradoxical frame, hard to conceptualize and difficult to apply.
If, on the one hand, research and innovation appear to follow logics blind to societal issues, on the other hand responsibility is still a blurred concept interpreted according to circumstances.

Different perspectives are implied in the RRI discourse which also renders its application difficult, because each social dimension proposes a different path for its implementation.

This book will try to indicate how such conflictual understanding of RRI is caused by a reductive interpretation of ethics and, consequently, of responsibility. Drawing on the relevant philosophical literature, the author develops a coherent conceptualization of responsibility and freedom across modernity in order to show how often we adopt a narrow version.

He then proposes an alternative interpretation that connects different layers of responsibility with the correlative freedom. This leads the analysis to promote a complementary approach to ethics in order to face societal challenges. The resulting framework represents an ethical approach to RRI that could help in overcoming conflictual perspectives and construct a multi-layer approach to research and innovation.