Moral Responsibility and Risk in Society: Examples from Emerging Technologies, Public Health and Environment

ISBN-13: 9781138192904 / Angielski / Twarda / 2018 / 186 str.

Jessica Nihlén Fahlquist

Opis

Risks, for example health risks and technological risks, attract a lot of attention in modern societies, from individuals as well as policy-makers. Human beings have always had to deal with dangers, but contemporary societies conceptualise these dangers as risks, indicating that they are to some extent controllable and calculable. Conceiving of dangers in this way implies a need to analyse how we can and should take responsibility for risks. This book examines concepts and notions of moral responsibility in relation to health risks, technological risks and environmental risks. It combines philosophical discussion of different concepts and notions of responsibility with context-specific applications in the areas of health, technology and environment. The author makes distinctions between individual and collective responsibility and backward-looking and forward-looking responsibility. Additionally, she discusses what it means to take responsibility and to communicate risks responsibly. The book consists of two parts addressing two crucial aspects of risks and responsibility: ascribing and distributing responsibility for risks and taking responsibility for risk management and communication. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental ethics, bioethics, public health ethics, engineering ethics, philosophy of risk and moral philosophy.

O autorze

Jessica Nihlén Fahlquist has a Ph.D. in philosophy and is a senior lecturer in biomedical ethics at the Centre for Research Ethics and Bioethics at Uppsala University in Sweden.