Tecnoscienza e razionalità del legislatore nell’Unione europea

The contribution reflects on the relationships among science, technology, and the law in the light of the end of a double “Cartesian dream” that has traditionally inspired both the knowledge and the normative domains. The myth of a self-referential rational legislator (the “legal Cartesian dream”) has been replaced with a vision where regulators have to explain and display their reasons in order to legitimize their choices, increasingly making reference to techno-scientific evidence. Indeed, the most recent European Union regulatory model, defined as smart legislation, tends to justify legal contents and procedures as far as they are science-based. However, while science and technological systems are called in to integrate and validate legal and policy choices, at the same time they are also facing an unprecedented crisis of epistemic and ethical credibility, both within the scientific communities and towards society (the end of the “scientific Cartesian dream”).