This article has a theoretical and a practical objective. The theoretical objective is to conceptualize responsible innovation as the adequate and timely inclusion of public values relevant to technological development. Technological innovations always occur in a specific institutional context, closely connected to stakeholder dynamics. Hence, an ideal approach to responsible innovation requires interdisciplinary research that incorporates: (i) the ethics of technology, to investigate the role of values in design; (ii) institutional theory, to understand the parts played by institutions in realizing values; and (iii) policy, planning and science, technology and society literature, to focus on stakeholder engagement. The practical objective is to explain how this approach can be operationalized. Since values emerge and evolve during the development and implementation of technologies, we take public debate to be the empirical source for extracting public values. Several salient questions need to be addressed such as: which and whose opinion should count, and how should value trade-offs be facilitated?

New technology brings great benefits, but it can also create new and significant risks. When evaluating those risks in policymaking, there is a tendency to focus on social acceptance. By solely focusing on social acceptance, we could, however, overlook important ethical aspects of technological risk, particularly when we evaluate technologies with transnational and intergenerational risks. I argue that good governance of risky technology requires analyzing both social acceptance and ethical acceptability. Conceptually, these two notions are mostly complementary. Social acceptance studies are not capable of sufficiently capturing all the morally relevant features of risky technologies; ethical analyses do not typically include stakeholders’ opinions, and they therefore lack the relevant empirical input for a thorough ethical evaluation. Only when carried out in conjunction are these two types of analysis relevant to national and international governance of risky technology. I discuss the Rawlsian wide reflective equilibrium as a method for marrying social acceptance and ethical acceptability. Although the rationale of my argument is broadly applicable, I will examine the case of multinational nuclear waste repositories in particular. This example will show how ethical issues may be overlooked if we focus only on social acceptance, and will provide a test case for demonstrating how the wide reflective equilibrium can help to bridge the proverbial acceptance‐acceptability gap.

Models for supporting climate adaptation and mitigation planning, mostly in the form of Integrated Assessment Models, are poorly equipped for aiding questions related to fairness of adaptation and mitigation strategies, because they often disregard distributional outcomes. When evaluating policies using such models, the costs and benefits are typically aggregated across all actors in the system, and over the entire planning horizon. While a policy may be beneficial when considering the aggregate outcome, it can be harmful to some people, somewhere, at some point in time. The practice of aggregating over all actors and over time thus gives rise to problems of justice; it could also exacerbate existing injustices. While the literature discusses some of these injustices in ad‐hoc and case specific manner, a systematic approach for considering distributive justice in model‐based climate change planning is lacking. This study aims to fill this gap by proposing 11 requirements that an Integrated Assessment Model should meet in order to enable the assessment of distributive justice in climate mitigation and adaptation policies. We derive the requirements from various ethical imperatives stemming from the theory of distributive justice. More specifically, we consider both intra‐generational (among people within one generation) and intergenerational (between generations) distributive justice. We investigate to what extent the 11 requirements are being met in recent model‐based climate planning studies, and highlight several directions for future research to advance the accounting for distributive justice in model‐based support for climate change planning.This article is categorized under: Climate, Nature, and Ethics > Climate Change and Global Justice

The introduction of new energy technologies may lead to public resistance and contestation. It is often argued that this phenomenon is caused by an inadequate inclusion of relevant public values in the design of technology. In this paper we examine the applicability of the value sensitive design (VSD) approach. While VSD was primarily introduced for incorporating values in technological design, our focus in this paper is expanded towards the design of the institutions surrounding these technologies, as well as the design of stakeholder participation. One important methodological challenge of VSD is to identify the relevant values related to new technological developments. In this paper, we argue that the public debate can form a rich source from which to retrieve the values at stake. To demonstrate this, we have examined the arguments used in the public debate regarding the exploration and exploitation of shale gas in the Netherlands. We identified two important sets of the underlying values, namely substantive and procedural values. This paper concludes with two key findings. Firstly, contrary to what is often suggested in the literature, both proponents and opponents seem to endorse the same values. Secondly, contestation seems to arise in the precise operationalization of these values among the different stakeholders. In other words, contestation in the Dutch shale gas debate does not arise from inter-value conflict but rather from intra-value conflicts. This multi-interpretability should be incorporated in VSD processes.

Governing risks is not only a technical matter, but also a matter of ethical and societal considerations. In this article, we argue that in addition to scientific and technical uncertainties, we need to also address normative uncertainties of risk decisions. We define normative uncertainties as situations where there are different partially morally defensible ‐‐ but incompatible ‐‐ options or courses of action, or ones in which there is no fully morally defensible option. We conceptualize normative uncertainties, distinguishing between the four categories of evolutionary, theoretical, conceptual, and epistemic normative uncertainties. We will show different instances of normative uncertainties in climate adaptation strategies. We finally present two methods for identifying and dealing with normative uncertainties, namely, the Wide Reflective Equilibrium and adaptive planning. Situations of normative uncertainties have always been and will continue to be present in risk decisions and they have often been dealt with in an implicit manner. In this article, we make them explicit, which could lead to better morally informed and justified decisions about climate risks.This article is categorized under: Climate, Nature, and Ethics > Ethics and Climate Change.

This paper approaches the choice between the open and closed nuclear fuel cycles as a matter of intergenerational justice, by revealing the value conflicts in the production of nuclear energy. The closed fuel cycle improve sustainability in terms of the supply certainty of uranium and involves less long-term radiological risks and proliferation concerns. However, it compromises short-term public health and safety and security, due to the separation of plutonium. The trade-offs in nuclear energy are reducible to a chief trade-off between the present and the future. To what extent should we take care of our produced nuclear waste and to what extent should we accept additional risks to the present generation, in order to diminish the exposure of future generation to those risks? The advocates of the open fuel cycle should explain why they are willing to transfer all the risks for a very long period of time (200,000 years) to future generations. In addition, supporters of the closed fuel cycle should underpin their acceptance of additional risks to the present generation and make the actual reduction of risk to the future plausible.