Complex Hazards, Technological Futures and Risk

1. Complex Hazards, Technological Futures and Risk Chris Groves ESRC Centre for Business Relationships, Accountability, Sustainability and Society (BRASS) www.brass.cf.ac.uk grovesc1@cf.ac.uk

2. Complex technologies May have unknown causal impacts, e.g. nanotechnology May involve many different social, economic and political dimensions in their management

3. Historical context • Debates in morality of risk: utilitarian versus deontological arguments • Complex technological hazards change the object of ethical concern • As such, they contain an immanent critique (Hegel/Lukacs) of the terms of the debate (“risk thinking”) • Present the distribution of uncertainty as an ethical and political problem

4. The timeprint of technology • Hans Jonas (The Imperative of Responsibility, 1984) • Mediation of social relations by technologies implies a special responsibility • Specifically, a future-oriented or ex ante responsibility for the well-being of strangers • The nature of technological uncertainty • Risks emerge over time “in the wild” • World as laboratory1 • Properties of technologies include their processual reach (“timeprint”2) 1 Krohn, W. and J. Weyer (1994). Society as a laboratory: the social risks of experimental research. Science and Public Policy 21(3): 173-83. 2 Adam, B. and C. Groves (2007). Future Matters: Action, Knowledge, Ethics, Leiden, Brill, pp. 115-17.

5. The ethics and politics of uncertainty • Talk of responsibility does not imply solely an abstract moral injunction • The “politics of uncertainty” concerns how social action produces and distributes uncertainty3 • the forms of power/knowledge which produce interpretations of uncertainty • how the power to act and influence social futures is distributed 3 Marris, P. (1996). The politics of uncertainty: attachment in private and public life, London; New York, Routledge.

6. “Risk thinking” and morality • Includes both • broadly utilitarian and • broadly deontological responses • Both assume that socially legitimate policy treatments of uncertainty requires risk knowledge4 • Reflect different and conflicting bodies of social practice and concepts of moral good4, 5 • Bureaucratic management  public interest • Jurisprudential  private property 4 Wynne, B. (2001). Creating public alienation: expert cultures of risk and ethics on GMOs. Science as Culture 10(4): 445-81, 5 McAuslan, P. (1980), The Ideologies of Planning Law, Oxford, Pergamon Press. 6 Macintyre, A. (1981). After virtue: a study in moral theory, London: Duckworth.

7. Commonalities • Both assume that the moral significance of uncertainty depends on how determinate it is • Prevalence of risk as organising concept • Uncertainty is subjective, risk is objective5 • Both tend to identify agency with reduction and control of uncertainty • Knowledge for control has normative meaning • Privileges autonomy over solidarity6 5 Knight, F. H. (1921). Risk, uncertainty and profit, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, p. 233. 6 Marris, P. (1996). The politics of uncertainty: attachment in private and public life, London; New York, Routledge, pp. 88-91.

8. Differences • Different foundational assumptions • Utilitarian • Mix of philosophical utilitarianism and welfare economics • Aggregate utility calculated through RCBA provides criterion of policy choice7 • Deontological • RCBA does not ask whether some risks are inherently socially unacceptable8 • Individual entitlement not to be harmed9 7 Sunstein, C. (2005), The Laws of Fear, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. 8 e.g. Cranor, C. F. (2007). Towards a non-consequentialist approach to acceptable risks. In: Risk: philosophical perspectives, ed. T. Lewens, London, Routledge: 36-53. 9 Hansson, S. O. (2007). Risk and ethics: three approaches. Risk: philosophical perspectives. T. Lewens. London; New York, Routledge: 21-35.

9. Risk thinking and foresight • Risk thinking implies that calculative knowledge of the future is foresight • In both moralities, the capacity to understand regularities is their knowledge base • For RCBA, knowledge of sets of homogenous events • For deontology, the predictable connection between acts and harms against the person or property (e.g. tort) • Uncertainty about the consequences of action remains an in principle temporary phenomenon

10. Objective Uncertainty • Science and technology studies/philosophy of technology • Uncertainty as an objective feature of complex systems/social action • Changes the temporal scope of thinking about uncertainty • Changes its future orientation – displaces risk from centre stage

11. Uncertainty as contingency

12. Unforeseeable consequences • Unforeseeability emerges from this analysis as an objective problem for social action • How do we deal with this problem as a feature of the technological mediation of social relations? • What social forms of knowledge, action, and normative resources are relevant?

13. Risk and reification • Concepts of risk are not foundational • Ethical and political problem: what is obscured by “risk thinking”? • Implies a critique of legitimacy of risk expertise (e.g. Jasanoff, Wynne) • Implies also an understanding of how unforeseeability and objective uncertainty matter, i.e. what are their social meanings?

14. The politics and ethics of uncertainty: a research programme • An immanent critique of the legitimacy of risk-based governance leaves us with a crucial problem: • How can finitude be made central to the ethics and politics of uncertainty? • Have begun to outline an approach, consisting of an interlinked series of themes, centring on • assumptions about subjectivity and value • How subjects and values construct futures

15. Progress and prospects • Several publications • Groves, C. (2006). Technological futures and non-reciprocal responsibility. International Journal of the Humanities 4(2): 57-62 • Adam, B. and C. Groves (2007). Future Matters: Action, Knowledge, Ethics, Leiden, Brill. • Groves, C. (forthcoming, 2009). Future Ethics: Risk, Care and Non-Reciprocal Responsibility.Journal of Global Ethics 5(1). • Key ongoing themes • Care, subjectivity and action • Critique of prevalent forms of value (instrumental versus intrinsic) • Moral pluralism, narrative and uncertainty

16. Complex Hazards, Technological Futures and Risk Chris Groves ESRC Centre for Business Relationships, Accountability, Sustainability and Society (BRASS) www.brass.cf.ac.uk grovesc1@cf.ac.uk