The Ethics of Risk: Ethical Analysis in an Uncertain World

By S. Hansson

When is it morally acceptable to expose others to risk? Most moral philosophers have had very little to say in answer to that question, but here is a moral philosopher who puts it at the centre of his investigations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Sep 20, 2013
• ISBN: 9781137333650

Book preview

The Ethics of Risk

Ethical Analysis in an Uncertain World

Sven Ove Hansson

Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

© Sven Ove Hansson 2013

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First published 2013 by

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Contents

List of Figures

Preface

Introduction

Part I  Why Risk Is a Problem for Ethics

1 The Uncertainties We Face

1.1 Risk

1.2 Uncertainty

1.3 Great uncertainty

1.4 Multi-agent interactions

1.5 Control

1.6 Conclusion

2 Difficulties for Moral Theories

2.1 The mixture appraisal problem

2.2 Utilitarianism

2.3 Deontological theories

2.4 Rights-based theories

2.5 Contract theories

2.6 Conclusion

3 Back to Basics

3.1 Delimiting consequences

3.2 Beyond broad consequences

3.3 Causality in reality

3.4 The (d)elusiveness of total consequences

3.5 Conclusion

Part II  Making Prudent Risk Decisions

4 Reflecting on the Future

4.1 The foresight argument

4.2 Specifying the branches

4.3 The value-base

4.4 The decision criterion

4.5 Conclusion

5 Thinking in Uncertain Terms

5.1 The proper use of expected utility

5.2 Uncertainty and moral leeway

5.3 Uncertainty about probabilities

5.4 Mere possibilities

5.5 Conclusion

Part III  Solving Conflicts of Risk

6 Fair Exchanges of Risk

6.1 A defeasible right

6.2 Reciprocal risk impositions

6.3 Justice and equal influence

6.4 Conclusion

7 Moral Excuses under Scrutiny

7.1 Undetectable effects

7.2 Consent

7.3 Contributions to self-harm

7.4 Conclusion and outlook

Notes

References

Index

List of Figures

5.1 The probability distribution of the overall treatment effect of a drug

5.2 Distribution curves for three drugs

5.3 Distribution curves for two drugs

Preface

Uncertainty about the future is a prominent feature of moral problems in real life. How can we know what is morally right to do when we do not know what effects our actions will have? Moral philosophy has surprisingly little guidance to offer here. Perhaps less surprisingly, the disciplines that systematize our approaches to risk and uncertainty, such as decision theory and risk analysis, have very little to say about moral issues.

This book is a report from an ongoing endeavour to extend the scope of moral theory to problems of uncertainty and risk. As I hope the book will show, moral philosophy has the capacity to provide insights and even guidance in such issues, but this cannot be achieved by just applying existing theory. We need to develop new moral theory that deals with uncertainty at its most fundamental level. It is the major purpose of the book to show how this can be done.

This work has benefited from co-operation and discussions with a large number of colleagues and from comments and criticism on numerous seminars, workshops and conferences. Thanks to all of you! Special thanks go to Barbro Fröding, Niklas Möller, Klaus Steigleder, Peter Vallentyne and Paul Weirich for their useful comments on a late draft of the book.

Sven Ove Hansson

Stockholm, June 2013

Introduction

We often have to make decisions despite being uncertain about their effects on future events. This applies to decisions in our personal lives, such as the choice of education, occupation, or partner. It applies equally to social decisions, including those in national and international politics.¹ In fact, risk and uncertainty are such pervasive features of practical decision-making that it is difficult to find a decision in real life from which they are absent.²

In spite of this, moral philosophy has paid surprisingly little attention to risk and uncertainty.³ Moral philosophers have been predominantly concerned with problems that would fit into a deterministic world where the morally relevant properties of human actions are both well-determined and knowable.⁴ The deterministic bias has remained in later years, in spite of the advent of new disciplines that have their focus on risk and uncertainty, such as decision theory and risk research.⁵

We can see this deterministic bias not least in the stock of examples that are used in moral philosophy. Moral philosophers do not hesitate to introduce examples that are far remote from the conditions under which we live our lives, such as examples involving teleportation and human reproduction with spores. However, it is a common feature of most examples used in moral philosophy that each option has well-defined consequences: You can be sure that if you shoot one prisoner, then the commander will spare the lives of all the others. You know for certain how many people will be killed if you pull or do not pull the lever of the runaway trolley, etc.⁶ This is of course blatantly unrealistic. In real moral quandaries, we are seldom sure about the effects of our actions.

It is in one sense quite understandable that moral philosophy has paid so little attention to risk and uncertainty. Like all academic disciplines, moral philosophy has to make its simplifications and idealizations.⁷ There is certainly no lack of difficult moral problems to deal with even if we restrict our attention to a counterfactual, deterministic world. But as will be shown in what follows, this is a weak defence since moral philosophers have included a fair amount of other, practically much less important complications into moral theory. The priorities do not seem to be right.

Another possible defence of this inattention relies on the division of labour between disciplines. It could be argued that the complications following from indeterminism should be taken care of in decision theory rather than in moral philosophy. But this picture is oversimplified, not least since the very act of taking or imposing a risk can have ethical aspects in addition to those that materialize only with the realization of its possible outcomes.⁸ Therefore, it is not sufficient to leave risk and uncertainty for decision-theoretical optimization to take place after the completion of a moral analysis that abstracts from risk and uncertainty. In order for moral philosophy to deal adequately with the actual moral problems that we face in our lives, it has to treat risk and uncertainty as objects (or aspects) of direct moral appraisal.⁹ This will have the effect of complicating moral analysis, but these are complications stemming from its very subject-matter and are avoidable only at the price of increased distance from actual moral life.

This book aims at showing how considerations of risk and uncertainty should inform our fundamental standpoints in moral philosophy. It consists of three parts. The first of these shows why and how risk is a problem for ethics. It begins with a chapter that introduces the varieties of unforeseeable and uncontrollable situations that moral analysis has to deal with. In the second chapter, the major available moral theories are shown to be incapable of providing reasonable action guidance in such situations. This failure is further analysed in the third and final chapter in this part of the book. An underlying, severely unrealistic conception of causality is shown to contribute heavily to the difficulties that conventional ethical theories have in dealing with situations involving risk or uncertainty.

The rest of the book is devoted to the more constructive task of developing a plausible ethical approach to problems involving risk and uncertainty. Its second part is devoted to situations not involving issues of justice or other potential conflicts of interest between people. In the first of these chapters a thought pattern called hypothetical retrospection is introduced for use in moral deliberation under risk and uncertainty. This is followed by a chapter in which this pattern is employed to develop several useful, more concrete patterns of argumentation.

The final part of the book is devoted to conflicts of interest concerning risks and in particular to risk impositions, i.e. actions by one person or group imposing a risk on some other person or group. The first chapter in this part proposes ethical criteria for determining whether a risk imposition is morally justified. These criteria are based on mutually beneficial exchanges of risk-taking. In the book’s final chapter, this is followed by a critical assessment of three common excuses for risk impositions. By exposing the weaknesses of these excuses, the chapter reconfirms the need to subject risk impositions to the rather strict criteria that have been developed in previous chapters.

Part I

Why Risk Is a Problem for Ethics

1

The Uncertainties We Face

Before investigating the moral implications of our ignorance about the future, we need to characterize it and clarify the meanings of the words that we use to describe it. The most common of these is ‘risk’.

1.1   Risk

The word ‘risk’ has several well-established usages.¹ Two major characteristics are common to them all. First, ‘risk’ denotes something undesirable. The tourist who hopes for a sunny week talks about the ‘risk’ of rain, but the farmer whose crops are threatened by drought will refer to the ‘chance’ rather than the ‘risk’ of precipitation.

Secondly, ‘risk’ indicates lack of knowledge.² If we know for sure that there will be an explosion in a building that has caught fire, then we have no reason to talk about that explosion as a risk. Similarly, if we know that no explosion will take place, then there is no reason either to talk about a risk. We refer to a risk of an explosion only if we do not know whether or not it will take place. More generally speaking, when there is a risk, there must be something that has an unknown outcome. Therefore, to have knowledge about a risk means to know something about what you do not know. This is a difficult type of knowledge to assess and act upon.³

Among the several clearly distinguishable meanings of the word ‘risk’, we will begin with its two major non-quantitative meanings. First, consider the following two examples:

‘A reactor-meltdown is the most serious risk that affects nuclear energy.’

‘Lung cancer is one of the major risks that affect smokers.’

In these examples, a risk is an unwanted event that may or may not occur.⁴ In comparison, consider the following examples:

‘Hidden cracks in the tubing are one of the major risks in a nuclear power station.’

‘Smoking is the biggest preventable health risk in our society.’

Here, ‘risk’ denotes the cause of an unwanted event that may or may not occur (rather than the unwanted event itself). Although the two non-quantitative meanings of ‘risk’ are in principle clearly distinguishable, they are seldom kept apart in practice.

We often want to compare risks in terms of how serious they are. For this purpose, it would be sufficient to use a binary relation such as ‘is a more serious risk than’. In practice, however, numerical values are used to indicate the size or seriousness of a risk.⁵ There are two major ways to do this. First, ‘risk’ is sometimes identified with the probability of an unwanted event that may or may not occur.⁶ This usage is exemplified in phrases such as the following:

‘The risk of a meltdown during this reactor’s lifetime is less than one in 10,000.’

‘Smokers run a risk of about 50 per cent of having their lives shortened by a smoking-related disease.’

It is important to note that probability, and hence risk in this sense, always refers to a specified event or type of events. If you know the probability (risk) of power failure, this does not mean that you have a total overview of the possible negative events (risks) associated with the electrical system. There may be other such events, such as fires, electrical accidents, etc., each with their own probabilities (risks).

Many authors (and some committees) have attempted to standardize the meaning of ‘risk’ as probability, and make this the only accepted meaning of the word.⁷ However, this goes against important intuitions that are associated with the word. In particular, the identification of risk with probability has the problematic feature of making risk insensitive to the severity of the undesired outcome. A risk of 1 in 100 to catch a cold is less undesirable than a risk of 1 in 1000 to contract a deadly disease. Arguably, this should be reflected in a numerical measure of risk. In other words, if we want our measure to reflect the severity of the risk, then it has to be outcome-sensitive as well as probability-sensitive.⁸ There are many ways to construct a measure that satisfies these two criteria, but only one of them has caught on, namely the expectation value of the severity of the outcome.

Expectation value means probability-weighted value. Hence, if 200 deep-sea divers perform an operation in which the risk of death is 0.001 for each individual, then the expected number of fatalities from this operation is 0.001 × 200 = 0.2. Expectation values have the important property of being additive. Suppose that a certain operation is associated with a 0.01 probability of an accident that will kill five persons, and also with a 0.02 probability of another type of accident that will kill one person. Then the total expectation value is 0.01 × 5 + 0.02 × 1 = 0.07 deaths. In similar fashion, the expected number of deaths from a nuclear power plant is equal to the sum of the expectation values of each of the various types of accidents that can occur in the plant.⁹ The following is a typical example of the jargon:

‘The worst reactor-meltdown accident normally considered, which causes 50 000 deaths and has a probability of 10–8/reactor-year, contributes only about two per cent of the average health effects of reactor accidents.’¹⁰

The same author has described this as ‘[t]he only meaningful way to evaluate the riskiness of a technology’.¹¹ Another example of this approach is offered by risk assessments of the transportation of nuclear material on roads and rails. In such assessments, the radiological risks associated with normal handling and various types of accidents are quantified, and so are non-radiological risks including fatalities caused by accidents and vehicle exhaust emissions. All this is summed up and then divided by the number of kilometres. This results in a unit risk factor that is expressed as the expected number of fatalities per kilometre.¹² The risk associated with a given shipment is then obtained by multiplying the distance travelled by the unit risk factor. These calculations will provide an estimate of the total number of (statistically expected) deaths.

The use of the term ‘risk’ to denote expectation values was introduced into mainstream risk research through the influential Reactor Safety Study (WASH-1400, the Rasmussen report) in 1975.¹³ Many attempts have been made to establish this usage as the only recognized meaning of the term.¹⁴

The definition of risk as expected utility differs favourably from the definition of risk as probability in one important respect: It covers an additional major factor that influences our assessments of risks, namely the severity of the negative outcome. However, other factors are still left out, such as our assessments of intentionality, consent, voluntariness, and equity. Therefore, the definition of risk as expected utility leads to the exclusion of factors that may legitimately influence a risk-management decision.

At face value, the identification of risk with statistical expectation values may seem to be a terminological issue with no implications for ethics or policy. It has often been claimed that we can postulate definitions any way we want, as long as we keep track of them. But in practice our usage of redefined terms seldom loses contact with their pre-existing usage.¹⁵ There is in fact often a pernicious drift in the sense of the word ‘risk’: A discussion or an analysis begins with a general phrase such as ‘risks in the building industry’ or ‘risks in modern energy production’. This includes both dangers for which meaningful probabilities and disutilities are available and dangers for which they are not. As the analysis goes more into technical detail, the term ‘risk’ is narrowed down to the expectation value definition. Before this change in meaning, it was fairly uncontroversial that smaller risks should be preferred to larger ones. It is often taken for granted that this applies to the redefined notion of risk as well. In other words, it is assumed that a rational decision-maker is bound to judge risk issues in accordance with these expectation values (‘risks’), so that an outcome with a smaller expectation value (‘risk’) is always preferred to one with a larger expectation value. This, of course, is not so. The risk that has the smallest expectation value may have other features, such as being involuntary, that make it worse all things considered. This effect of the shift in the meaning of ‘risk’ has often passed unnoticed.

Since ‘risk’ has been widely used in various senses for more than 300 years, it should be no surprise that attempts to reserve it for a technical concept have given rise to significant communicative failures. In order to avoid such failures, it is advisable to employ a more specific term such as ‘expectation value’ for the technical concept, rather than trying to eliminate the established colloquial uses of ‘risk’.¹⁶ It seems inescapable that ‘risk’ has several meanings, including the non-quantitative ones referred to above.

Before we leave the notion of risk, a few words need to be said about the contested issue whether or not risk is an exclusively fact-based (objective) and therefore value-free concept. It is in fact quite easy to show that it is not. As we have already noted, ‘risk’ always refers to the possibility that something undesirable will happen. Due to this component of undesirability, the notion of risk is value-laden.¹⁷ This value-ladenness is often overlooked since the most discussed risks refer to events such as death, diseases and environmental damage that are uncontroversially undesirable. However, it is important not to confuse uncontroversial values with no values at all.

It is equally important not to confuse value-ladenness with lack of factual or objective content. The statement that you risk losing your leg if you tread on a landmine has both an objective component (landmines tend to dismember people who step on them) and a value-laden component (it is undesirable that you lose your leg). The propensity of these devices to mutilate is no more a subjective construct than the devices themselves.¹⁸

In this way, risk is both fact-laden and value-laden. However, there are discussants who deny this double nature of risk. Some maintain that risk