Abstract
In contrast to the rich and often streamlined literature on the process of risk analysis, the concepts grounding the practice are under-theorised. When explicitly treated, theorists’ analyses diverge. On the one hand, a dominant view in risk analysis is to treat risk and safety as relatively straightforward objective natural concepts, determined by physical facts and thus fitted for scientific study. On the other hand, theorists from the social sciences argue that risk is a ‘social construct’, a subjective social feature rather than a feature of the objective reality.
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Notes
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That is, reject strong versions of constructivist theses that entail a denial of real risks. Many weaker constructivist theses are perfectly compatible with the reality of risk (Möller 2011). I agree that risks are such real features of the world – although I will not argue for it in this chapter and my arguments will not depend on them being so.
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This assumption may of course be questioned (Möller et al. 2006). In this chapter, I will grant the antonym usage for comparative risk/safety terms, and treat ‘safer’, ‘safest’, etc., as synonymous to ‘less risky’, ‘least risky’, etc. Note, however, that this does not include a position as to when something is safe, that is, how the predicate ‘safe’ should be interpreted (but see ibid and Möller 2011 for a discussion). Compare also with the discussion of acceptable levels of risk and safety in the main text below.
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This is especially evident in cost-benefit analysis involving risk. Cf. Ackerman and Heinzerling (2002) for a critical analysis.
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Cf., for example, Kraus et al. (1992/2000). Similarly, Leiss (2004) argues for more emphasis on risk communication and ‘science translation’ (p.403) into language more easily accessible to the public, reasoning that (p.401) ‘more science will not solve the essential problem, which is public distrust of the risk assessments. We knew enough about dioxin risk by about 1985, for example, to make an educated guess that exposure to dioxins is not, and is highly unlikely to become, a significant risk factor […]. Yet the science goes on, and the controversy persists, because insufficient attention has been paid to the need for conducting a fair and prolonged risk dialogue with the public about dioxins’. Cf. Hansson (2005) and Möller (2009) for critical discussions.
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Note that I use ‘normative’ to refer both to deontic concepts such as right, ought and permitted and to value concepts such as good, bad and better, since it is the distinction between the cluster of these broadly normative/evaluative concepts on the one hand, and the natural concepts on the other, that is of interest in this chapter.
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It is worth mentioning that the probabilistic notion of risk corresponds to a quantitative interpretation of risk. As noted in, for example, Hansson (2004) and Möller et al. (2006), the term ‘risk’ may, depending on the context, refer to such different entities as the probability of a harmful event, the harmful event itself, the cause of the harmful event or even the fact that a decision is made under conditions of known probabilities.
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Later, in this chapter, we will question also this naturalist assumption for harm and probability.
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Note that for this to be plausible, we do not need to claim that the actual risk of X is greater or even equal to Y when the risk according to the probabilistic notion claims that it is less for X than for Y. The weaker claim that the risks of X and Y are incommensurable – that in cases such as these we cannot say that one is lower than the other – is sufficient.
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In radiation protection, for example, there is an analogous, interesting tension between the two principles of optimisation and dose limitation – cf. Wikman-Svahn et al. (2006).
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Interestingly, neighbouring countries such as Sweden and Norway, normally taking the same approach to matters of safety, have taken diametric positions regarding road cables. In Norway, the use is forbidden, whereas in Sweden, the use of road cables is not only allowed but expanding.
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Cf. Hare’s (1952) defence against the claim that we may define moral terms as we please (p. 92): [S]ince what we are trying to do is to give an account of the word ‘good’ as it is used – not as it might be used if its meaning and usage were changed – [the reference to usage] is final. It is therefore no answer […] to claim that a ‘naturalist’ might if he pleased define ‘good’ in terms of some characteristics of his choice. Such an arbitrary definition is quite out of place here; the logician is, it is true, at liberty to define his own technical terms as he pleases, provided that he makes it clear how he is going to use them. But ‘good’ in this context is not a technical term used for talking about what the logician is talking about; it itself is what he is talking about; it is the object of his study, not the instrument. He is studying the function of the word ‘good’ in language; and so long as he wishes to study this, he must continue to allow the word the function which it has in language […].
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The latter an explicit claim of my computer dictionary (Apple’s Dictionary 2.1.2).
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The role of theoretical commitments for the causal theory and other contemporary theories of meaning and reference is sometimes not appreciated, but it is acknowledged by its central proponents. In extending Kripke’s causal theory from names to natural kinds, Putnam himself explicitly mentions the need for theoretical commitments for the reference of both names and natural kinds (Putnam 1975, 225).
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The term ‘reflective equilibrium’ was made famous by Rawls (1971).
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Cf. Möller et al. (2006), 421–424, for an overview of common suggestions in the literature.
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Note that a naturalistic reduction in the sense of interest here depends on the availability of a descriptive notion that does not use evaluative terms. For example, a second-order probability, interpreted as a subjective probability that the objective probability is correct, would count as a naturalistic reduction granted there is an available descriptive measure of the subjective probability (say, by some procedure such as De Finetti’s game) in addition to the objective probability.
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I thank a reviewer for pointing to this option.
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A related problem is how to express these criteria using only natural concepts. For example, even if we grant that meteor is a natural concept, it does not follow that we can spell out, say, ‘extraordinary events such as falling meteors’ in a fully natural way.
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Similarly, even granted (for the sake of argument) a naturalistic way of describing both epistemic uncertainty and distributive normativity able to handle the cases in the previous section, it remains unclear how complex cases are to be treated – cases involving, for example, many different expectation values, epistemic uncertainty and harm distribution, or involving all three of these aspects.
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While we have been interested in natural concepts (and reductions) rather than in the descriptive concepts for which the thick concept debate is typically framed, the former is a genuine subclass of the latter: every natural concept is also a descriptive concept (although not the other way around). Hence, scepticism about descriptive reductions of thick concepts entails scepticism about natural reductions.
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This is naturally an area of severe controversy, but we should note that there are ambitious systems of measurement designed to take account of both the quantity and the quality of life generated by healthcare interventions, such as QALY (quality-adjusted life year), reflecting the practical relevance of these concerns.
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Stevenson (1944), 206–207, Hare (1952), 2. Also the early Blackburn seems to have favoured such an analysis in Blackburn (1984), 148–149. Note, however, that also most influential early twentieth-century cognitivist moral philosophers assumed that moral judgments could be expressed using only a few thin evaluative concepts such as good and right and that some sort of conjunctive manoeuvre for thick concepts is possible. Elstein and Hurka (2009) point this out, naming Sidgwick, Moore, Ross, Broad and Ewing – an impressive list indeed – as companions in guilt. Another interpretation has been to treat a thick concept as a purely descriptive concept (e.g. Ayers 1936, 110–114; Mackie 1977, 41).
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Catherine Elgin calls this the ‘skeleton account’ in her (2005), 343.
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The rationale for calling an action cruel rather than merely describing it in more neutral terms is to tune in to this evaluative aspect. Cf. McDowell (1981).
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Richard Hare defended his reductionist strategy as late as in Hare (1997), for example, p. 61. Simon Blackburn, however, who holds a similar view in his 1984, later abandoned that view and explicitly denied it in his 1998.
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In the words of W. D. Ross: ”Loyalty to the facts is worth more than a symmetrical architectonic or a hastily reached simplicity.” (Ross (1930/1967), 23.)
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Möller, N. (2013). The Non-reductivity of Normativity in Risks. In: de Vries, M., Hansson, S., Meijers, A. (eds) Norms in Technology. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 9. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5243-6_11
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