Responsibility+(Schaffer)

=Responsibility=

= = In legal terms, responsibility refers to two related concepts: liability and duty. An individual can be responsible for her actions, and therefore held liable for their consequences, or she may be responsible for a property, a child, or a pet boa constrictor, and therefore entrusted with the duty of its upkeep, safety, or not letting it strangle the neighbor's dog. In each of these senses, responsibility is a relationship that links the individual to the consequences of her actions.

Within the (broadly defined) canon of STS, responsibility is often framed in opposition to calculability and prediction; it necessitates an engagement with uncertainty. Derrida describes a responsibility to the unforeseeable future-to-come that we can only achieve by interrupting and transforming our responsibilities to the past. Derridean responsibility requires a change in old frames of reference: “the activating of responsibility (decision, act, praxis) will always take place before and beyond any theoretical or thematic determination” (1995, p. 26). McCarthy and Kelty, in their ethnography of nanotechnologists, find scientists making a similar turn toward responsibility in the face of unknowable risk:

For these nanotechnologists, the pertinent risks were undefined, potentially unknowable...It is for this reason that they turned (and we turn with them) from the language and tools of risk to an investigation of the making of responsibility. (2010, p. 3)

Responsibility is part of a scientist's (or policymaker's, or ethnographer's) engagement with her work in the face of uncertainty. In a sense it is a liability: to take responsibility for research is to accept the blame or praise when its consequences manifest themselves. But her duties surrounding her research are more interesting: not only the social duty to use her research to make the world a better place, but the duty to the research itself. Responsibility connects a researcher to her work and its implications; like with a pet boa constrictor, a researcher's responsibility isn't met simply by preventing the snake from causing harm, but by making sure that the snake is alive and happy.


 * Derrida and the unknown other**

Jacques Derrida argues that ethical action is based not only on an accounting for our inherited principles, rules, and standards of behavior, but also on questioning and transforming those principles. This requires a movement outside of our reason.

The moment of decision, the moment of responsibility, supposes a rupture with the order of knowledge, with calculative rationality; to that extent, there is what Derrida calls a “madness of the impossible” as opening to the incalculable. (Raffoul, 2008, p. 285)

In making this rupture, in challenging our orders of knowledge, we necessarily split our selves from our former selves. In this sense, any decision is made by the other, and in deciding, our responsibility is not to ourself but to the unknowable other. By making a decision and taking this responsibility, we press forward into unknown territory.

We cannot know in advance where being responsible will take us and we cannot, or should not, take knowledge of our heritage as a guide. What characterises responsibility is not certainty, but questioning. Responsibility consists ‘‘in responding, hence in answering to the other, before the other and before the law. . . [with] dissent and inventive rupture with respect to tradition, authority, orthodoxy, rule, or doctrine’’ (Diprose, 2006, p. 440)

Even in the new territory, even once we have taken on responsibility for the other and ventured into the unknowable future, we must still make new ruptures, still split ourselves from former selves as we take on new responsibilities to new others.

The overriding lesson to be learned about responsibility for the future-to-come is that it takes work and has not yet and cannot ever arrive. To become responsible as possible, for responsibilities worthy of the name, one cannot find comfort in nostalgia for gifts already given or for responsibilities already enacted...in the extraordinary responsibility of inheriting the future-to-come, it is all of this that we must continue to interrupt, transform, and put at risk. (Ibid., p. 446)

The upshot of Derrida's deconstructive ethics is that taking on responsibility necessitates a change in our old systems of knowledge. Because of this adjustment – this splitting of the self – responsibility also implies an unpredictability: we lose our old rationality when we take on the new responsibility. Furthermore, this process is ongoing: in the unpredictability of the consequences of our actions, we must constantly take on new responsibilities, break with our old rationalities, and redefine ourselves.


 * McCarthy, Kelty and the responsibilities of nanotechnologists**

Elise McCarthy and Christopher Kelty, in their ethnography of researchers at the Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology (CBEN), find a shift from an emphasis on risk in nanotechnology to an emphasis on responsibility. Risk is the ubiquitous framework for assessing new technologies, since it allows for easy calculation and some semblance of prediction. Responsibility is the “implicit shadow” of risk:

Measuring risk allows individuals and organizations to make responsible choices; taking unnecessary risks is seen as irresponsible; improper or inadequate risk assessment can lead to fault and hence responsibility for harm. Calculable risks construct a responsibility-as-liability for past harms, and incalculable risks induce a responsibility for future harms – perhaps an impossible one. (2010, p. 3)

But risk fails to account for nanotechnology. The methods are novel, the applications are still being defined; calculation of risk is entirely impossible. However, responsibility has its difficulties as well: researchers have the dual and sometimes conflicting responsibilities of protecting the funding of their research and protecting the environment and the public.

The effort to navigate these responsibilities fed into the interest in starting ICON, the International Council on Nanotechnolgy, which “became the medium through which responsibility as an external demand or calling was processed, purified, or filtered into something that CBEN could imagine responding to in scientific terms ” (Ibid., p. 22).

ICON served as a tool for communicating to nanotechnologists what their responsibility to the public was, so that they could redefine their standards accordingly. Their work and their responsibilities shape one another; “the activity of defining responsible nanotechnology is coterminous with the struggle to define why nanotechnology itself is novel” (Ibid., p. 23).

As nanotechnologists take on responsibility for their research and responsibility for the public, they make Derridean breaks with their old selves – the old means of understanding their practice make no sense for nanotechnology, so they piece together new rationalities. Researchers are guided into uncertainty by their responsibilities to the public and these responsibilities are helping to guide them in their responsibilities to their research. This close relationship between responsibility and uncertainty links together their research and their ethics; as McCarthy and Kelty point out, “separating the science from the ethical deliberation merely obscures the practices of both as they occur” (5). Nanotechnologists are charged with being caretakers of their science: with making sure that it moves forward the way that nanotechnology should, and also with making sure that it is responsive to the public good.


 * See also**

Responsibility (Banks) Articulation (Schaffer) Critique (Jenkins) Critique (Wilcox)


 * References**

Derrida, J. (1995). The gift of death. (D. Wills, Trans.). Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Diprose, R. (2006). Derrida and the extraordinary responsibility of inheriting the future-to-come. Social Semiotics, 16(3), 435-447. McCarthy, E. & Kelty, C. (2010). Responsibility and nanotechnology. Social Studies of Science, 20(10), 1-28. Raffoul, F. (2008). Derrida and the ethics of the im-possible. Research in Phenomenology, 38, 270–290.