The relatively new discipline of risk analysis promises to provide objective guidance in some of the most controversial issues in modern high‐technology societies. Four conditions are discussed that must be satisfied for this promise to be fulfilled. Since none of these conditions is satisfied, risk analysis does not keep its promise. In its attempts to reduce genuinely political issues to technocratic calculations, it neglects many of the factors that should influence decisions on risk acceptance. A list of tentative guidelines is (...) given for numerical decision support that encourages democratic decision‐making instead of trying to evade it. (shrink)

Extended antipaternalism means the use of antipaternalist arguments to defend activities that harm (consenting) others. As an example, a smoker’s right to smoke is often invoked in defence of the activities of tobacco companies. It can, however, be shown that antipaternalism in the proper sense does not imply such extended antipaternalism. We may therefore approve of Mill’s antipaternalist principle (namely, that the only reason to interfere with someone’s behaviour is to protect others from harm) without accepting activities that harm (consenting) (...) others. This has immediate consequences for the ethics of public health. An antipaternalist need not refrain from interfering with activities such as the marketing of tobacco or heroin, boxing promotion, driving with unbelted passengers, or buying sex from “voluntary” prostitutes. (shrink)

Human beings have the unique ability to view the world in a detached way: We can think about the world in terms that transcend our own experience or interest, and consider the world from a vantage point that is, in Nagel's words, "nowhere in particular". At the same time, each of us is a particular person in a particular place, each with his own "personal" view of the world, a view that we can recognize as just one aspect of the (...) whole. How do we reconcile these two standpoints--intellectually, morally, and practically? To what extent are they irreconcilable and to what extent can they be integrated? Thomas Nagel's ambitious and lively book tackles this fundamental issue, arguing that our divided nature is the root of a whole range of philosophical problems, touching, as it does, every aspect of human life. He deals with its manifestations in such fields of philosophy as: the mind-body problem, personal identity, knowledge and skepticism, thought and reality, free will, ethics, the relation between moral and other values, the meaning of life, and death. Excessive objectification has been a malady of recent analytic philosophy, claims Nagel, it has led to implausible forms of reductionism in the philosophy of mind and elsewhere. The solution is not to inhibit the objectifying impulse, but to insist that it learn to live alongside the internal perspectives that cannot be either discarded or objectified. Reconciliation between the two standpoints, in the end, is not always possible. (shrink)

When philosophers undertake to say what it is that makes life worth living, they generally display a procrustean habit of thought which the practice of philosophy itself does much to encourage. As a result, they arrive at an image of the human good that is far more controversial than they suspect. The canonical view among philosophers ancient and modern has been, in essence, that the life lived well is the life lived in accord with a rational plan. To me this (...) conception of the human good seems manifestly wrong. The idea that life should be the object of a plan is false to the human condition. It misses the important truth which Proust, by contrast, discerned and made into one of the organizing themes of his great meditation on disappointment and revelation, A la recherche du temps perdu : The happiness that life affords is less often the good we have reason to pursue than the good that befalls us unexpectedly. (shrink)

"[This book] proposes new foundations for the Bayesian principle of rational action, and goes on to develop a new logic of desirability and probabtility."—Frederic Schick, _Journal of Philosophy_.

A probabilistic explication is offered of equipoise and uncertainty in clinical trials. In order to be useful in the justification of clinical trials, equipoise has to be interpreted in terms of overlapping probability distributions of possible treatment outcomes, rather than point estimates representing expectation values. Uncertainty about treatment outcomes is shown to be a necessary but insufficient condition for the ethical defensibility of clinical trials. Additional requirements are proposed for the nature of that uncertainty. The indecisiveness of our criteria for (...) cautious decision-making under uncertainty creates the leeway that makes clinical trials defensible. (shrink)

Contrary to the received view, decision theory is not primarily devoted to instrumental (ends-to-means) reasoning. Instead, its major preoccupation is the derivation of ends from other ends. Given preferences over basic alternatives, it constructs preferences over alternatives that have been modified through the addition of value object modifiers (modes) that specify probability, uncertainty, distance in time etc. A typology of the decision-theoretical modes is offered. The modes do not have (even extrinsic) value, but they transform the value of objects to (...) which they are applied. A rational agent's total set of preferences should be coherent, but from this it does not follow that her preferences over mode-containing objects have to be derivable from her preferences over mode-free objects. (shrink)

Mainstream risk analysis deviates in at least two important respects from the rationality ideal of mainstream economics. First, expected utility maximization is not applied in a consistent way. It is applied to endodoxastic uncertainty, i.e. the uncertainty (or risk) expressed in a risk assessment, but in many cases not to metadoxastic uncertainty, i.e. uncertainty about which of several competing assessments is correct. Instead, a common approach to metadoxastic uncertainty is to only take the most plausible assessment into account. This will (...) typically lead to risk-prone deviations from risk-neutrality. Secondly, risks and benefits for different persons are added to form a total value of risk. Such calculations are used to support the view that one should accept being exposed to a risk if it brings greater benefits for others. This is in stark contrast to modern Paretian welfare economics, that refrains from interindividual comparisons and does not require people to accept a disadvantage because it brings a larger advantage for others. (Published Online July 11 2006). (shrink)

Mainstream moral theories deal with situations in which the outcome of each possible action is well-determined and knowable. In order to make ethics relevant for problems of risk and uncertainty, moral theories have to be extended so that they cover actions whose outcomes are not determinable beforehand. One approach to this extension problem is to develop methods for appraising probabilistic combinations of outcomes. This approach is investigated and shown not to solve the problem. An alternative approach is then developed. Its (...) starting-point is that everyone has a prima facie moral right not to be exposed to risk. However, this right can be overridden if the risk-exposure is part of an equitable system for risk-taking that works to the advantage of the individual risk-exposed person. (shrink)

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. ;Typically we maintain two incompatible standards towards right action and good character, and the tension between these polarities creates the paradox of moral luck. In practice we regard actions as right or wrong, and character as good or bad, partly according to what happens as a result of the agent's decision. Yet we also think that people should not be held responsible for matters beyond their control. ;This split underpins Kant's assertion (...) that only the good will is securely good, that its goodness is impervious to outcome ill-luck. Some commentators, such as Martha Nussbaum and to some extent Bernard Williams, think that this simply writes off the paradox. Williams asserts that the paradox is insoluble, and that its inescapability threatens the notion of agent responsibility. In contrast Thomas Nagel argues that agents' most cherished projects may be indeed be subject to luck, but that does not mean that their deepest motivations are moral. This, I suggest, is one of several means whereby we might limit the effect of the paradox without denying that the tension exists. But I also argue that it is wrong to accuse Kant of ignoring the paradox. ;Ethical consequentialists, on the other hand, appear to have no problem with moral luck, because the paradox depends on a dichotomy between the outside world and the locus of moral worth in the individual agent. But this turns out not to be true. The problem of moral luck is not some strange Kantian fixation, but a general dilemma: a variant on what Nagel terms "the problem of excess objectivity" which cuts across all of ethics and metaphysics. ;Retaining a broadly Kantian notion of agent-responsibility, but limiting what agents are responsible for, requires us to delineate the realm of ethics more narrowly than has been done by those who believe that the rational and/or prudential are coterminous with the ethical. This strategy for minimising the paradox's impact is explored in two areas from medical ethics, the allocation of scarce medical resources and informed consent, and two from public policy, secrecy and nuclear deterrence. Throughout, the analysis seeks to test Nagel's maxim that the best we can hope for is to act in such a manner that we would not have to revise our opinion of how we should have acted once the consequences of our actions become apparent. (shrink)

The following values have no corresponding Zotero field: PB - JSTOR.

The purpose of this presentation is to introduce both the concept of risk and the precautionary principle, that is a major policy principle in present-day risk management. Since risk has been the subject of many misconceptions I will do this in large part by criticizing seven views on risk that I believe to have caused considerable confusion both among scientists and policy-makers. But before looking at the seven myths of risk, let us begin with the basic issue of defining “risk”. (...) The word “risk” often refers, rather vaguely, to situations in which it is possible but not certain that some undesirable event will occur. In addition, the word has several more specialized meanings. Let me illustrate this by making a few statements about the single most important preventable health hazard in non-starving countries. First: “Lung cancer is one of the major risks that affect smokers.” Here, we use “risk” in the following sense: (1) risk = an unwanted event which may or may not occur. 1 (15). (shrink)

Chance complicates the apparent control that human beings have over their life-world. Although the scientific community has come a long way in taming probabilities, coincidence will always remain unavoidable and principally irreducible. In this dissertation we analyze the distinction between probability and coincidence. Coincidence is the frustration of explanation. Only if the agent acts in order to avoid regret, are her actions immune to coincidence. We shall call this action as being in accordance with deliberative rationality. A probabilistic concept of (...) explanation is developed to rescue the concept of responsibility in the presence of uncertainty. ;Life is a giant lottery, in which the prizes are handed out at birth. Can this chance distribution be called fair? No. The concept of a 'fair chance' is misleading because chance is essentially morally void. The only way the lottery of life can be called fair is when the random distribution at birth is made subject to additional moral rules of fairness, i.e., principles of distributive justice. ;A donkey when caught between two equally attractive bundles of hay, could starve to death because he has no motivation to prefer one over the other. Human beings have access to random devices that, precisely in situations that are causally under-determined, provide a choice. Game theory, decision theory and statistics are important tools for the moral philosopher. In particular, the divisory property of a lottery can be employed in optimality considerations and ideas of efficiency. ;The twentieth century has shown a growing awareness of the predominance of risk in human society. However, the solutions to risk issues have been characterized by technocratic approaches, regulatory failures, and little awareness of moral implications. Libertarians argue that it is most efficient and morally superior to have market forces regulate the level of risk in society. However, risks provide ideal opportunities for free rides that upset the market outcome. For this reason, there is a role for targeted governmental intervention to neutralize the adverse consequences of risks and to provide a sufficient level of safety for its people and future generations.$\sp*$ ftn$\sp*$Originally published in DAI Vol. 58, No. 5. Reprinted here with corrected title. (shrink)

This essay explores three questions: What are the salient features of Hobbes's concept of prudence? Prudence for Hobbes is a capacity to predict the future rooted in experience. Second, can 'Hobbesian individuals' have significantly different capacities for prudence? Challenging a common view, asserted even by Hobbes himself, I contend that Hobbes's own conception of prudence yields significant variation across individuals' capacities for prudence. Finally, what is the role of prudence in Hobbes's political thought? A consequence of the significant variation among (...) individuals is that prudence plays a much more consequential role in Hobbes's political philosophy than is often appreciated. (shrink)