In Praise of Precipitatory Governance as a (Meta-)Principle of Responsible Innovation

The most natural way to think about “responsible innovation” is how the European Union and the scholars associated with the Journal of Responsible Innovation think about it – namely, in terms of being wise before the fact, when “the fact” consists in suboptimal, if not catastrophic, impacts for a broad range of constituencies in the wake of some proposed innovation. In that case, one tries to anticipate those consequences with an eye to mitigating if not avoiding them altogether. This is normally the territory of the precautionary principle, according to which innovations with great capacity for harm – regardless of benefits – would not be introduced at all. “Responsible innovation” tries to take a more moderate line, recognizing the generally beneficial character of innovation but insisting on monitoring its effects as it is unleashed on society and the larger environment. The guiding idea is that one might have one’s cake and eat it: Innovations would be collectively owned to the extent that those potentially on the receiving end would be encouraged from the outset to voice their concerns and even opposition, which will shape the innovation’s subsequent development. But one needs to be responsible not only before the fact but also after the fact, especially when “the fact” involves suboptimal impacts, including “worst case scenarios”. This is the opposite of anticipatory governance. Call it precipitatory governance. Precipitatory governance operates on the assumption that some harm will be done, no matter what course of action is taken, and the task is to derive the most good from it. I say “derive the most good” because I do not wish to limit the range of considerations to the mitigation of harm or even to the compensation for harm, though I have dealt with that matter elsewhere (Fuller and Lipinska 2014: ch. 4). In addition, the prospect of major harm may itself provide an opportunity to develop innovations that would otherwise be seen as unnecessary if not utopian to the continuation of life as it has been. Here I refer to the signature Cold War way of thinking about these matters, which the RAND Corporation strategist Herman Kahn (1960) dubbed “thinking the unthinkable”. What he had in mind was the aftermath of a thermonuclear war in which, say, 25-50% of the world’s population is wiped out over a relatively short period of time. How do we rebuild humanity under those circumstances? This is not so different from ‘the worst case scenarios” proposed nowadays, even under conditions of