Towards Principles for Responsible Futures

Exploring the ethical implications of future-oriented activities, this book establishes a framework for responsible anticipation in practice.

There is increasing use of ‘foresight’ methods such as scenarios in the public and private sectors. Currently, these methods lack any recognised approaches to the elaboration of ethics or responsibility for consequences, for instance greater technological innovation can cause greater uncertainty rather than reduce it. This book addresses a growing interest in ways to think about the future, stimulated by an increasing sense of uncertainty, complexity, and threats to humanity, as well as visionary imagined possibilities. The chapters draw on research and reflective practice and address future-oriented action from an ethical perspective by considering the ways in which responsibility is, or is not, evident in a variety of cases and contexts. An action framework of proto-principles addressing relationality, temporality and perspectivity, combined with an anticipatory ethical stance are synthesised. The book offers ethically driven inspiration to those concerned with the professional and academic aspects of futures thinking, foresight and anticipation such that responsibility becomes more explicit in their methods and practices. It also offers a wider framework to groups working to foster more just and favourable conditions for future people, such as activist movements, policy makers and private enterprises. This framework will enable them to articulate how their actions relate responsibly to the future, reveal whose futures they anticipate in their narratives and their actions, and finally explicate their underlying assumptions and limitations toward taking actions which are collectively beneficial for wider humanity and all of Earth’s life.

The book will be of use to academics, policy makers, and interested in futures studies, anticipation studies, technology studies, social sciences and humanities.