Abstract
The introduction to the proceedings of the Royal Academy of Engineering 2006 seminar on The Economics and Morality of Safety 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 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. … PDF of full paper