A Call for Reflexivity in the Governance of the Finnish eGovernment System Development

Some of these examples contain only clear mistakes and design failures which could have been – at least partially – avoided. Others, like the Case of Finnish biometric passports, show alarming features of lessening both privacy of the citizens and the security of the whole society. The reasons behind the lack of ethical thinking during these design processes are investigated in this chapter.

Governance Theory and Practice

European political life involves a productive tension between liberalist and communitarian tendencies. This ’Libero-Communitarianism’ in the EU is the backdrop to various governance policies and potentials. This chapter develops a broad analysis of the governance setting in Europe and draws out some key areas of potential problems. This is based in the Ethical Governance of Emerging Technologies (EGAIS) project findings, and mirrors some of the issues flagged as ethically important in the field of emerging technologies. That such issues permeate European research and approaches to governance is testimony to their centrality and to the influence of Libero-Communitarian interactions.

Transformation of Proceduralism from Contextual to Comprehensive

Proceduralism has been a major philosophical stream that gathers some outstanding philosophers, such as John Rawls or Jürgen Habermas. The general idea of proceduralism, especially in the practical domains of morals, law and communication, comes from the need to provide some rational justifications to the rules, actions and decisions to be adopted or made by the society or the power in the context of highly ‘plural-complex-developed’ societies. It is particularly concerned with the governance of ethics, in other words, with the institutional and organisational conditions that the procedures of assessment must fulfil so that ethical questions can be addressed, especially in the domain of scientific and technical research and innovation. We show that classical proceduralism does not adequately address problems raised by an ethics of science and technology, and we take the context of Europe as a typical example of what a complex multicultural set of societies can be.

Habitus and Reflexivity

The author intends to explore the work that can be done by somebody on his/her own history in order to modify its course. Those questions have been largely debated. The purpose of this paper is to analyze Pierre Bourdieu’s thinking of those topics. He is concerned with the interiorization of social structures (habitus) and suggested self socioanalysis as a new way of highlighting them in 1991. Can somebody truly escape from social structure’s interiorization effects or even have an action upon them?

The Internet as a Normative Device for Cultural Practices

This paper aims to show that the Internet is not just a technical pattern and a normative framework aimed at producing and enacting otherwise defined cultural experiences. Information and communication technologies are complex programmed and interrelated functions eventually realised in the form of a cultural ecosystem – the Internet as such – and they do not simply form a web of industrially organised devices and services. It is then wrong to say that networks crush our minds and that nowadays acculturation prevails. The Internet is a cultural matrix generating new forms of meaningful interactions through the permanent and pervasive interconnectedness it allows for.

Impact of Architecture on Governance

This paper presents the basics about network architecture and some of the current proposals for the future of the internet. There are two keys factors to understand the ongoing discussions: the definition of what is a Network usually depends of the industry you are coming from, while all of these kinds of networks are needed. The second key deals with two different kinds of values: the value of scarcity and the value of abundance: efficiency versus adaptability. This leads to new technology such as Cognitive Radio.

Governance in Technology Development

With an increasing focus on the inclusion of considering the ethical and social impact of technology developments resulting from research in the European Union, and elsewhere, comes a need for a more effective process in technology development. Current ethics governance processes do not go far enough in enabling these considerations to be embedded in European Union research projects in a way that engages participants in technology development projects. Such a lack of engagement not only creates a distance between the technology developers and ethics (and ethics experts) but also undermines the legitimacy of decisions on ethical issues and outcomes, which in turn has an impact on the resulting innovation and its role in benefitting individuals and society. This chapter discusses these issues in the context of empirical work, founded on a theoretical base, undertaken as part of the EGAIS (Ethical Governance of Emerging Technologies) EU co-funded FP7 project.

The “Pragmatist Turn” in Theory of Governance

In this essay, the author focuses on what Jacques Lenoble and Marc Maesschalck call the “pragmatist turn” in the theory of governance. Speaking of pragmatist turn, they refer to recent work by a range of authors such as Charles Sabel, Joshua Cohen and Michael Dorf, who develop an experimental and pragmatist approach of democracy. The concept of “turn” may raise some perplexity. The author believes that we can speak of “turn” about these experimentalist theories because these theories introduce a key issue, what we may call the question of “self-capacitation of the actors.” The author tries to show that this issue constitutes a novelty compared to the deliberative paradigm in the theory of governance. While the issue of collective learning is a black box in the deliberative paradigm, democratic experimentalism seeks to reflect on how the actors can organize themselves to acquire new capacities and to learn new roles. The author concludes in revealing the limits of this approach.

A Pragmatic Approach to Polynormative Governance

In the first and second part of the present article, the author provides a pragmatic reading of the very idea of governance. With the help of the late pragmatist Frederick Will’s thoughts about the philosophic governance of norms, governance can be construed as a practice that is situated within other practices and whose aim is lending guidance to these practices. Since the point of establishing governance practices is to improve the targeted governed practices, governance is characterized by normativity, e.g. rationality assumptions, reflexivity and relativity to the general and particular significance of the governed practice. A schema is introduced for abductive inferences (as outlined by Charles Sanders Peirce) from observed defects in practices to expected improvements in governance practices. In response to the question, how governance itself is to be governed where it stands in further need of governance, I argue in the third section that there is an interesting problem of “polynormative” governance: Different forms of governance in different domains of practice may differ drastically in their advantages and disadvantages when compared from some particular evaluative point of view, and they will differ drastically across different evaluative points of view. The author argues that argumentative discourse, not in Michel Foucault’s, but in Karl-Otto Apel’s and Jürgen Habermas’ sense of the term, is the governance practice of last resort for our giving and taking reasons. The relation of argumentative discourse to democracy (being the governance practice of last resort for political power) remains to be explored.

Three Models for Ethical Governance of Nanotechnology and Position of EGAIS’ Ideas within the Field

Based on an analysis of the current literature on nanoethics, this paper proposes to identify three different models for ethical governance of nanotechnology, respectively called ’conservative model’, ’inquiry model’ and ’interpretative model’. The propositions of the EGAIS1 Research Project in terms of ethical governance of nanotechnology are related to the latter model.