The introduction to the proceedings of the Royal Academy of Engineering 2006 seminar on The Economics and Morality of Safety (RAEng 2006) concluded with a list of issues that were 'worthy of further exploration'. I have reduced them to the following questions: • Why do moral arguments about 'rights' persist unresolved? • Why can risk managers not agree on a common value for preventing a fatality? • Why do governments and the media react differently to different causes of death? • Why do some institutions profess to be pursuing zero risk, knowing that achieving it is impossible? • Why do some institutions pretend that their risk management problems can be reduced to a calculation in which all significant variables can be represented by a common metric? • Why are societal attitudes and risk communication still seen as problematic after many years of investigation? • Why are certain accident investigations, criminal or civil, seen as 'over zealous' by some and justifiable by others? These questions are addressed with the help of a set of risk framing devices. For some my conclusion will be discouraging: all of these issues are likely to remain unresolved. Risk is a word that refers to the future. It has no objective existence. The future exists only in the imagination, and a societal consensus about what the future holds does not exist. © Springer-Verlag London Limited 2009.
CITATION STYLE
Adams, J. (2009). Risk management: The economics and morality of safety revisited. In Safety-Critical Systems: Problems, Process and Practice - Proceedings of the 17th Safety-Critical Systems Symposium, SSS 2009 (pp. 23–37). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84882-349-5_2
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