The notion of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) has increasingly attracted attention in the academic literature. Up until now, however, the literature has focused on clarifying the principles for which research and innovation are responsible and on examining the conditions that account for managing them responsibly. Little attention has been reserved to exploring the political-economic context in which the notion of RRI has become progressively more prominent. This article tries to address this aspect and suggests some preliminary considerations on the connections between the specific understanding of responsibility in RRI and the framing of responsibility in what has been synthetically defined as ‘neoliberalism’. To do so, we try to illustrate how the idea of responsibility has evolved over time so that the specific characteristics of RRI can be better highlighted. These characteristics will then be discussed against the features of neoliberalism and its understanding of responsibility. Eventually, we reaffirm a view of RRI centred on fundamental rights as a possible point of departure between these two perspectives on responsibility.

Introduction: Governing technologies under uncertainty conditions 1 Academic literature and public debates alike have increasingly acknowledged the pervasiveness of uncertainty in science, technology and their governance. Uncertainty is no longer viewed as a residual area of ignorance and risk to be gradually reduced by way of increasing expert knowledge and enhancing technological control. On the contrary, uncertainty is viewed as the unavoidable consequence of the interaction of technology with its environment, that is, of technology's ecological nature (Luhmann 1993). As an effect of these limitations of our experimental knowledge, the introduction of new technologies in society becomes a form of "societal experimentation" (e.g. van de Poel 2009; Felt and Wynne 2007), and risks and possible developments can be detected only after technologies have been introduced in and have displayed their impacts on society. Notions like "manufactured risk" (Giddens 1999) or "secondary consequences" (Beck 1992) were introduced to interpret this paradoxical relationship between increased contingency and the unprecedented knowledge about and control of social life and the physical world, characterizing new and emerging technologies. Indeed, the increased manipulative knowledge of nature and society produces uncertainty rather than reducing it (Coeckelbergh 2012).

This article aims to explore the debate on human enhancement (HE) from the perspective of the evolutions of responsibility paradigms, and in particular from the perspective of the so-called Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) approach. The aim is not to explore the arguments pro or contra the ethical legitimacy and/or technical feasibility of human enhancement, but rather exploring if, and how, RRI perspective can shape the debate on human enhancement (and vice-versa). In particular, the human enhancement debate will be read through the lenses of four main responsibility paradigms we sketch by examining both the historical and conceptual evolution of the responsibility idea, as well as the dynamics of its ascription. In order to provide a useful scheme for interpreting human enhancement, RRI will be characterised as a distinctive responsibility model that can subsequently be used to frame the debate on HE with a particular emphasis on its normative implications, as well as on its social and political significance.

Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) aims at being a new governance paradigm aiming at steering the innovation process in a participative manner by constructing responsibility as a shared process between innovators and societal stakeholders, rather than a remedy to its failures. In order to achieve those goals, RRI implements a collaborative and inclusive process between innovators and societal stakeholders, widely based on the idea of granting a wider participation of societal actors to the innovation process. The purpose of steering the research and innovation processes through participation of societal actors is one of the distinguishing characteristics of RRI approach, which this way aims at taking into account the increasing political implications of scientific innovation. In order to do so, RRI model promotes governance strategies focusing on actors' responsibilisation, which make appeal to actors' capacity of reciprocal commitment towards some common goals not mandated by the law. Whilst voluntary non-binding regulatory approaches seem to be the 'natural' way to implement RRI in practice, nevertheless some concern remains about the scope and the limits of the contextual agreements reached each time, in particular their capacity to grant respect to some fundamental values, which are part of the European political and legal culture, and which are at risk to become freely re-negotiable within the RRI context if we base it only on the idea of autonomy, participation and consent. On the contrary, the

This essay critically examines the place that the reference holds relative to law, and more broadly to the legal phenomenon, in the final phase of Ricœur’s reflection on the capable subject. References to the law and more in general to the legal sphere play an increasingly relevant role in the later reflections of Ricœur, in particular in articulating its “little ethics.” This is done, by contrast, through a deep reconfiguration of some fundamental legal categories, in particular that of legal subject and that of responsibility. The implications of this theoretical renewal will be examined both as regards the internal articulation of Ricœur’s late thought as well as regards their potential repercussions for the contemporary legal theory.