Photo by Vicki & Chuck Rogers
Monday, March 10, 2008
Colloquium: risk ethics; a provisional approach
Colloquium by Henrik Pontzen (Capco)
15.30 - 17.00 hours, room a3.100, TPM building, TU Delft
Abstract ‘Risk Ethics: A Provisional Approach’
Risk can be defined as the uncertain or unpredictable consequence of an action. Risk ethic deals with the question to what extent it is morally justifiable to jeopardize the needs, interests or rights of others.
Generally, one can distinguish three different types of concepts in ethics: Deontological approaches, which focus on rights and duties, consequential approaches, which determine the goodness of an action by concentrating on its effects, and procedural approaches, which define the morality of an action with regard to the conditions of the decision making process.
I will argue that each of these concepts cannot be properly applied to the ethics of risk. Rather, we need a “provisional” or “pragmatic” approach which selectively integrates the advantages of deontological, consequential and procedural approaches into a pragmatic ethical theory of risk.
