Technological Risk: Probabilities and Emotions

Social decisions about technological risks are an important problem for applied ethics. Sven Ove Hansson raises the difficulty of reconciling standard decision theory, with its rule of maximizing expected utility, with moral evaluations. Sabine Roeser argues that moral emotions about risks are not irrational and that they should be taken into account along with expert recommendations. Both approaches constitute a criticism of the technocratic point of view that seeks to resolve conflicts in risk management based on a strictly technical and economic cost-benefit calculation; and they propose a democratic alternative based on deliberation that explicitly incorporates the consideration of moral values. The difficulties of this proposal are, on the one hand, how to maintain the basic idea that deciding taking subjective probabilities into account is part of rationality and; on the other, how to resolve the possible conflict between emotions and reasons.