the ethics of risk

The intersection of risk and ethics is concerned with questions of whether and when it is morally permissible to impose a risk of harm on another person. It seems pretty clear that murdering someone is wrong, but what about behaviors that carry a very small risk of killing another person? Here our moral intuitions are less clear. Firing a bullet into the air when there’s a small chance of it killing someone when it falls back to Earth seems morally wrong even if the risk is small (I was horrified to learn from my partner that this was a normal occurrence on the Fourth of July growing up in Indianapolis.) But acts we’d hardly consider morally suspect like driving your car impose a small risk of serious harm on other drivers and pedestrians: almost 40,000 people are killed each year in the US by drivers.

The psychologist Paul Slovic identified five factors which seem to influence the perceived acceptability of a risk:

• how controllable the risk is
• how well-known the risk is (i.e. to science)
• the novelty of the risk
• how voluntary the risk is
• the severity of the consequences

Are those who face the risk also those who reap the benefits?

Ursula Franklin on the risks associated with new technologies:

We cannot be part of a discussion on what risks a certain technology has without asking whose risks. It makes an awful lot of difference. Assume you are talking about video display terminals, for example; the great discussion is “Are they or are they not putting the operater’s health or eyes at risk?” You don’t discuss whether there are risks; you discuss whose risks. Who is it that is at risk? It’s quite pointless to talk about risk-benefit without saying “Are those wo are at risk also getting the benefits, or are those who are getting the benefits very far removed from the risk?”…The questions to ask are “Whose benefits? Whose risks?” rather than “What benefits? What risks?”

While all technologies bring risks and benefits, their use can be considered ethical only to the extent that the risks and benefits are distributed fairly. Alas, there’s often a lot of money to be made by offloading the risks on to others as externalities while reaping the benefits yourself.

Further Reading

• “The Moral Problem of Risk Impositions: A Survey of the Literature” Madeleine Hayenhjelm and Jonathan Wolff, an excellent syllabus and historical summary of the field
• “Risk” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, a brief overview