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This paper draws on the emerging field of innovation ethics (IE) to complement the more established field of responsible innovation (RI) by focusing on key ethical issues raised by technological innovations. One key limitation of influential frameworks of RI is that they tend to neglect some key ethical issues raised by innovation, as well as major normative dimensions of the notion of responsibility. We explain how IE could enrich RI by stressing the more important role that ethical analysis should play in RI. We focus on two transversal issues of IE: the issue of redrawing conceptual boundaries, especially the topic of the artificialization of the world, and the issue of responsibility, especially the notion of total responsibility. We address these two issues from the thematic perspective of IE, thereby generating lessons learnt for RI. These two examples are taken as illustrations and blueprint of the dialogue that should take place between the two fields.

Enacting an AI system typically requires three iterative phases where AI engineers are in command: selection and preparation of the data, selection and configuration of algorithmic tools, and fine-tuning of the different parameters on the basis of intermediate results. Our main hypothesis is that these phases involve practices with ethical questions. This paper maps these ethical questions and proposes a way to address them in light of a neo-republican understanding of freedom, defined as absence of domination. We thereby identify different types of responsibility held by AI engineers and link them to concrete suggestions on how to improve professional practices. This paper contributes to the literature on AI and ethics by focusing on the work necessary to configure AI systems, thereby offering an input to better practices and an input for societal debates.

Ethics is seen as a critical resource for data law. But beyond this almost slogan-like truism, the exact functions which ethics might play in data law are often left unclear. This contribution clarifies the ways in which data ethics and data law are intertwined and, on this basis, offers guidelines for practitioners in terms of interpreting the GDPR. Two types of norms allow for modulation between the law and ethics of data. The first type of norms is the ‘principles’ of the GDPR. Ethical resources can be used for the interpretation of these norms using a Rawlsian reflective equilibrium approach. The second type of norms is evaluative judgment norms, the most well-known of which derive from the characteristically risk-based responsibility that the GDPR bestows on controllers. For these evaluative norms, ethical resources could be used in three different functions: as a tool for the identification and assessment of risks, as a resource for improving data controller processes, and as the basis for the codes of conduct foreseen by the GDPR. These three potential modulations between ethics and the law of data help controllers of data make sense of their responsibilities in light of the GDPR’s requirements.

This paper addresses legitimacy issues of the international IP regime by focusing on how normative resources internal to the Trade‐Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) might be drawn upon. It combines legal analysis and political theory to account for the TRIPS’ normative foundations (Art. 7 and 8). The paper's primary contribution is to show that these special legal norms are both a locus of balancing the objectives and principles and a guiding light for the interpretation of subsequent norms contained within the treaty. Their content might best be understood using concepts coined by political theory. This combination of legal and philosophical insights identifies two levels of relevance for these special legal norms: as a specification about the type of competition in global trade foreseen by the TRIPS, and as a justification for intellectual property rights protection. To illustrate the relevance of this approach, the paper briefly considers the panel report in Plain Packaging and its use of Art. 7 and 8. Overall, the paper entails both a methodological contribution on the dialog between political theory and law on international trade, as well as a legal argument on how to unpack normative resources entailed by the TRIPS itself.