Filosofia Unisinos

Unisinos Journal of Philosophy

19(3):235-240, sep/dec 2018
Unisinos – doi: 10.4013/fsu.2018.193.06

PHILOSOPHY SOUTH

Philosophical issues related

to risks and values
Renato Rodrigues Kinouchi1

ABSTRACT
This paper begins with the assumption that the concept of risk implies an entanglement
between facts and values. This is not an arbitrary assumption since it can directly be de-
duced from the standard notion of risk. The value-ladenness of risk raises at least two fur-
ther issues: the first one concerns the scales adopted to evaluate the severity of risks; the
second concerns the commensurability/comparability of risks to human health and the envi-
ronment. Some additional light is shed on those issues by asking what would happen if the
models used in risk analysis were understood as fictions limited by the values that they can
include. From this point of view, controversies on the limited scope of standard risk assess-
ments are not only descriptive but also evaluative.

Keywords: commensurability, comparability, fiction, models, risk, values.

Are risks value-free?

Risk is a polysemic word usually associated with the general idea of danger, harm or loss re-
sulting from actions whose consequences cannot be completely foreseen. Its etymology is uncer-
tain because similar words can be traced back to Greek, Latin and Arabic, but there is enough evi-
dence on its Mediterranean origin and its specific relatedness with maritime voyage hazards such
as strong storms, hidden reefs, pirate attacks, etc. (Knutsen et al., 2012). This ancient nautical
slang was incorporated into economic and legal jargon with the rise of merchant capitalism and
the increasing demand for maritime commerce insurance2. Today the word risk is employed in
multifarious theoretical and practical contexts – for instance, statistics, decision theory, finance,
medicine, engineering, ecology, climatology, sociology, etc. – which contributes to the plurality
of its meanings.
In order to address the initial question, it is necessary to begin with one of the available
definitions of risk, and it seems reasonable to choose the standard technical definition usually
adopted by risk analysts: risk is the expectation value of an unwanted event defined as the product
of the probability of the event – expressed as a number within the interval [0, 1] – by a quanti-
1 tative estimate of its severity – that is, the magnitude of the harm (cf. Hansson, 2013, p. 9-10).
Universidade Federal do ABC.
Centro de Ciências Naturais e Hu- It is important to note that, according to such definition, risk varies as a function of both the
manas. Alameda da Universidade, probability of the event and the amount of damage it may cause. For instance, supposing the
s/n, 09606-045, São Bernardo do probability of an earthquake in Alaska and in California were the same, the latter would pose a
Campo, SP, Brazil. E-mail:
[Link]@[Link]
higher risk due to the significant difference in both the material losses and the number of people
2
For more comprehensive ac-
potentially affected. Thus, even for this technical definition, risk cannot be value-free since one
counts on the history of insurance of the equation terms must imply some measure of a value (human lives, material goods, etc.)
contracts and life annuities, see
Franklin (2015, chapter 10; 2016);
Fressoz (2012, chapter 1) and This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC
Hacking (1990, chapter 6). BY 4.0), which permits reproduction, adaptation, and distribution provided the original author and source are credited.
 Renato Rodrigues Kinouchi

under risk. The philosopher Sven Hansson (2004, 2005, 2009, which amounts to the likelihood of S coming about (e.g., the
2012, 2013) has often emphasized that “risk always refers to probability of an earthquake and the estimated distance of its
the possibility that something undesirable will happen. Due epicenter from highly populated areas), and an evaluative di-
to this component of undesirability, the notion of risk is val- mension related to a precise forecast of its severity (e.g., the
ue-laden” (Hansson, 2013, p. 10). number of residents probably affected, the existence of chem-
Such value-ladenness does not mean, however, that risk ical industries or nuclear plants in the area). This thickness
is then a fact-free concept grounded exclusively upon human of risk involves a functional distinction less committed to the
value judgements. Risk assessments may be seen as socially ontological assumptions present in the traditional dichotomy
constructed in the same trivial sense that any human inqui- judgements of facts versus values judgements. Importantly,
ry depends on social cooperation, linguistic conventions, etc., Möller reframed the discussion with an approach resistant
but, although it is true that people actually have very differ- to reductionist views: “there is an essential interdependence
ent risk perceptions about, say, earthquakes, it is beyond any between the natural-descriptive aspects and the normative
reasonable doubt that strong seismic events are really much aspects [...] The output of recent moral philosophy is skepti-
more frequent along the boundaries of tectonic plates, which cism of the reductive claim for thick concepts such as risk and
in turn justifies investments in building design, evacuation safety” (Möller, 2012, p. 76).
alarm systems and other socially constructed safety mecha-
nisms in cities located near geological faults. For Hansson,
Risks and value comparisons
In this way, risk is both fact-laden and val-
ue-laden […] A notion of risk that connects What is the role played by values in risk analysis? If
in a reasonable way to the conditions of hu- we begin with the preliminary question “what are values?”,
man life will have to accommodate both its the usual answer includes a huge variety of desirable things
fact-ladenness and its value-ladenness. The worthy of pursuance by human beings, from personal needs,
real challenge is to disentangle the facts wants and pleasures to more objective goods such as health,
and the values sufficiently from each other
wealth and, above all, the preservation of our own lives. The
to make well-informed and well-ordered de-
cision processes possible (Hansson, 2013, field of axiology, understood in a broad sense, includes a
p. 11). constellation of further questions such as “what is the nature
of values?”, “are values subjective or objective?”, “are there in-
The fact-value distinction played an important role in trinsic values?”, “can values be compared?”, and so on. The
early philosophical works on risk analysis since it made possi- last question, about value comparisons, is decisive to clarify
ble to detect hidden value assumptions usually overlooked by how risk analysts measure and compare the severities of po-
scientists, engineers and risk analysts.3 More recently, Möller tential harms.
(2012) reframed this issue by considering the concept of risk In standard risk assessments, the quantity of deaths
as a thick ethical concept. Thick ethical concepts are concepts (casualties) is a widespread evaluative measure of severity.
that have both descriptive and evaluative contents such as, say, In order to calculate the expectation value of a risk, each life
“cruel”, “brave” and “selfish” (cf. Williams, 2006). These con- is valued the same and therefore can be arithmetically add-
cepts are hardly reducible to thin ethical concepts like “right” or ed to other lives, making it possible to construct an interval
“bad” because they exhibit descriptive features absent in the scale where positive integers (1, 2, 3, …, n) define degrees of
latter. As an illustration, to say that a certain person is self- severity. So, the value of life is disposed into an interval scale
ish does not only mean he or she behaves badly but denotes because “for the expected value of harm to be well defined [...]
a specific way he or she gives priority to himself or herself we must be able to decide not only that harm A is more severe
over others. Thick concepts, in short, belong to a grey zone than B, and that B is more severe than C, but also the relative
where descriptive and evaluative aspects, related to a given severity between them” (Möller, 2012, p. 63). In other words,
state of affairs, merge into each other. According to Möller, if each life is valued the same, then it is possible to say that
“that something is safe is a positive feature of the entity, and “five deaths are five times worse than one death”. More impor-
that something carries a risk is a negative feature of it. But it tantly, this assumption takes for granted value commensura-
is not simply positive or negative, it is positive or negative in bility: casualties become a cardinal unit to measure severity.
a certain way; it has certain descriptive shape” (Möller, 2012, One may say that risk analysis cannot rely only on such
p. 75, original italics). quantitative measure. Suppose a risk that does not cause
For Möller, risk should be considered a thick concept death but instead leads to limb amputation. For this case, is
since to affirm that the situation S is risky involves both a losing one leg equal to losing one arm? If so, is losing two legs
descriptive dimension about the potentially harmful event, twice worse than losing one arm? In short, is it reasonable to

3
According to Hansson, works such as Thomson (1985), MacLean (1986), Shrader-Frechette (1991) and Cranor (1997) had as their “main
purpose to expose the value-dependence of allegedly value-free risk assessments” (Hansson, 2012, p. 29).

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 Philosophical issues related to risks and values

measure the severity of limb amputation by an interval scale? and qualitative comparison (Espinoza, 2009,
One may say that the (dis)value of limb amputation depends p. 129, emphasis mine).
on personal preferences: for example, for Admiral Nelson
the lack of an arm was not significant for the victory in the In order to point out a problem concerning risk com-
Battle of Trafalgar, but probably a naval officer without a leg parisons, let’s denominate as cardinalizable those values which
would be very much limited in his ability to command (due can be arranged into interval scales (e.g. cardinal utility, mon-
to ship instabilities, decks with lot of stairs, etc.); on the oth- ey, number of casualties, etc.), and let’s denominate as ordinal-
er hand, for the aviator Captain Douglas Badler, the lack of izable those values which can be arranged into ordinal scales
both legs did not jeopardise his performance in the Battle of (e.g. ordinal utility, preferences, rankings). This distinction is
Dunkirk, but he would hardly be a fighter ace without an arm. usual in statistics, economics and related disciplines: for in-
Although it does not sound reasonable to propose an interval stance, the notion of cardinal utility has a long history going
scale to measure the severity of limb amputations, severity back to Bentham and it was further developed by neoclassical
may be comparable by ordinal scales of preference: for Admi- economists and by Von Neumann and Morgenstern; regard-
ral Nelson, a leg was more valuable than an arm; for Captain ing the notion of ordinal utility, it is widely used by contem-
Badler, an arm was more valuable than a leg. porary economists and Bayesian statisticians.
The value-ladenness of risk involves the issue of com- Nevertheless, there is a background question on wheth-
mensurability/comparability of the unwanted outcomes. er every value can be adequately disposed into interval or or-
According to Ruh Chang, “two items are incommensurable dinal scales. There is no impediment to suppose that certain
just in case they cannot be put on the same scale of units of values could not be arranged into any type of scale, resulting
value, that is, there is no cardinal unit of measure that can in their incomparability. For example, there are discussions
represent the value of both items” (Chang, 2015, p. 205). about value incomparability in ethical debates concerning in-
As to incomparability, “two items are incomparable just in compensable harms4 (e.g. Thomson, 1986; Shrader-Frechette,
case they fail to stand in an evaluative comparative relation, 1991) and in empirical studies on the so-called protected val-
such as being better than or worse than or equally as good as ues5 (e.g. Baron and Spranca, 1997; Tetlock et al., 2000). As a
the other” (Chang, 2015, p. 205). From a logical point of view, matter of fact, “some people think that some of their values
incomparability entails incommensurability but the reverse are protected from trade-offs with other values” and they
does not hold. In what specifically regards risks, Nicolas Espi- hold those values “as possessing infinite or transcendental
noza describes those relations in the following way: significance that precludes comparisons, trade-offs, or indeed
any other mingling with bounded or secular values” (Espino-
I shall say that two risks are evaluatively in- za, 2009, p. 130-131). And in addition, “laypersons often feel
commensurable if and only if there is no car- that it is unethical to assign monetary prices to risk imposed
dinal scale with respect to which the severity
upon humans or the environment” (Espinoza, 2009, p. 130).
of both risks can be compared. In addition,
two risks are evaluatively incomparable if and
This issue embarrasses the method of cost-benefit analysis
only if it is not the case that they can be or- (CBA), which tries to compare risks using assignments of a
dinally ranked, which is to say that is not the monetary price as a common measure for their severities:
case that one risk is better, worse or equally
as good as the other. Note that incommen- In a typical CBA, two or more options in a
surability thus defined does not necessarily public decision are compared to each oth-
imply incomparability; the failure to compare er by careful calculation of their respective
two risks cardinally, for instance the failure consequences. These consequences can be
to say that risk A is, say, three times more different in nature, e.g. economic costs, risk
severe than B, does not automatically imply of disease and death, environmental dam-
that we cannot say that risk A is more severe age etc. In the final analysis, all such con-
than risk B. It may be helpful to view the dis- sequences are assigned a monetary value,
tinction between incommensurability and and the option with the highest value of
incomparability, namely that between or- benefits minus costs is recommended or
dinal and cardinal measurement, as analo- chosen [...] Cost-benefit analysis is contro-
gous to the distinction between quantitative versial and has repeatedly been subject to

4
For Thomson, “Now if you cause me an incompensable harm, you cause me a harm which (by definition) no amount of money in
damages will compensate me” (1986, p. 158). In the same line, for Shrader-Frechette, “If we consider Judith Jarvis Thomson’s notion of
‘incompensable harms,’ harms so serious that no amount of money could possibly compensate the victims (e.g., for a loss of a species
or habitat), then it appears that extinction and death, at least, are obviously ‘incompensable harms’” (1991, p. 115).
5
For Baron and Spranca (1997), “Protected values are those that resist trade-offs with other values, particularly economic values.
We propose that such values arise from deontological rules concerning action. People are concerned about their participation in trans-
actions rather than just with the consequences that result. This proposal implies that protected values, defined as those that display
trade-off resistance, will also tend to display quantity insensitivity, agent relativity, and moral obligation”.

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 Renato Rodrigues Kinouchi

severe criticism not least from philosophers. listic knowledge available, the values involved also influence our
Most of this criticism has focused on two choices. Roughly speaking, the epistemic uncertainty related to
practices. One of these is the assignment of our limited probabilistic knowledge comes accompanied by an
a monetary price to (the loss of) a human evaluative uncertainty related to our value judgements. Such
life. The other is contingent valuation, in
evaluative limitation should not be disregarded in matters such
which the prices of non-market goods such
as environmental assets are determined by
as, for example, biotechnological innovations whose large-scale
asking people what they are willing to pay side effects can be irreversible (Garcia and Martins, 2009; Lacey,
for them (Hansson, 2007, p. 163-164; cf. Es- 2005, 2009; Mariconda, 2014; Martins, 2012). Consider the fol-
pinoza, 2009, p. 130). lowing passage about risk assessment of transgenic agriculture:

Against such criticisms, experts and decision-makers Standard risk assessment has kept some
tend to argue that cost-benefit analysis permits to estimate potentially harmful varieties of transgenics
how much should be spent in actions of risk prevention and from being marketed. Nevertheless, it is
unable to address, among other things, (a)
risk management, with the intention of allocating finite re-
potential social risks – e.g. monopolization
sources to minimize harms of different sorts and magnitudes. of the world’s food supply, undermining the
From this point of view, sacred and protected values may be conditions for other forms of farming, im-
of interest to psychologists and philosophers, but “if incompa- poverishment and dislocation of small-scale
rability is widespread, then what we do in most choice situa- farmers – and (b) potential risks to the envi-
tions fall outside the scope of practical reason” (Chang, 2015, ronment occasioned by transgenics in virtue
p. 206). Cost-benefit analysis takes for granted that values of the fact that usually they are commodities
under risk can be measured (by means of interval scales) or and integral to current projects of large cor-
compared (by means of ordinal scales) because without “ac- porations, and (c) ecological and long-term
environmental risks that arise because of so-
curate comparisons in terms of severity, we will not be able
cial mechanisms, e.g., the failure (or inabili-
to perform accurate and cost-effective trade-offs between ty) of farmers to adhere to regulations that
risks and their associated benefits” (Espinoza, 2009, p. 131). are assumed to be in place when judgments
As stated above, the procedure of comparing values disposed of risk in practice are based on standard risk
into interval or ordinal scales is also taken for granted in sev- assessment (Lacey, 2009, p. 853-854).
eral other fields of scientific inquiry. Risk analysts just follow
the same established path, despite the worry on the part of Lacey has detailed the controversies on transgenics in
some laypersons and philosophers. dozens of works, but here I can only briefly outline the gener-
al lines of his argument presented in “The interplay of scien-
Limitations of standard tific activity, worldviews and value outlooks”. For Lacey, bio-
technologists confine their research within a decontextualized
risk assessments approach (DA) in which values related to social well-being
and environmental safety are excluded and “empirical data
Technological risks are particularly problematic for are selected, sought out [...] and reported using descriptive
standard risk assessments. The main problem concerns the categories that are generally quantitative, applicable in virtue
lack of statistical data to estimate the objective probabili- of measurement, instrumental and experimental operations”
ty of potential harms. Standard risk assessments have been (Lacey, 2009, p. 843). Consequently, standard risk assess-
successfully applied to natural catastrophes, occupational ments tend to focus only “on the quantitative and probabilistic
accidents, shipwrecks and traffic accidents, etc., for which study of (anticipated) hazards for health and the environment
there are immense statistical recordings. The potential over the relatively short time scale of laboratory and con-
harms of technological innovations cannot be estimated in trolled field studies, deploying categories acceptable within
the same way for an obvious reason: they never occurred be- DA” (Lacey, 2009, p. 853, italics mine). The decontextualized
fore. Risk assessments on technological innovations require approach goes hand in hand with a materialist worldview
models based on conditional probabilities subjectively esti- deeply informed by the values of technological progress. Nev-
mated by engineers and risk analysts. Indeed, due to the lack ertheless, for Lacey, materialism and the values of technolog-
of previous statistical data, technological risks are not risks ical progress are insufficient “to justify adopting the decon-
properly speaking, but uncertainties. textualized approach virtually to the exclusion of conducting
There is voluminous literature on the distinction be- research under competing strategies” (Lacey, 2009, p. 851).
tween risk and uncertainty according to the type of proba- In addition, one may argue that socio-environmental values
bilistic knowledge available. The distinction involves several are extremely important and indeed strongly preferable to
complications which have been extensively discussed in deci- the values of technological progress, up to the point that no
sion theory, in economics, in statistics and in philosophy (see further benefits from transgenics could balance the risks im-
Hájek and Hitchcock, 2016). But besides the type of probabi- posed on health and on the environment by their use. In the

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 Philosophical issues related to risks and values

last years such an argument against transgenics, which evokes To regard risk models as fictions does not mean they are
the precautionary principle, has begun to inform an increas- useless mathematical tools. The intention is to keep in mind
ing number of restrictive policies in the European Union.6 how deceptive they may be in virtue of the limited range of
I wish to conclude with the suggestion that some addi- values which they include. The value-ladenness of risk implies
tional light is shed on this issue if we consider that risk analysis, issues which indeed affect every field of scientific inquiry that
like other scientific practices, requires the construction of mod- demands some procedure of value measurement. The models
els which must be assumed to be fictions. Several authors such as used in standard risk assessments are fictions, like other sci-
Cartwright (1983, 1999, 2010), Contessa (2010), Fine (1993), entific models, in the sense that they take for granted some
Godfrey-Smith (2006, 2009), Frigg (2010a, 2010b, 2010c), Leng idealized assumptions on values that define which potential
(2001), Morgan (2001), Rahman and Redmond (2015) have harms we will anticipate and which ones we will not. This
discussed such approach – usually called fictionalism in philos- is particularly relevant in controversies about technological
ophy of science7 – according to which “scientific textbooks and innovations, not only because determining the probability of
journal articles abound with passages that appear to be mean- those potential harms is a hard task, but mainly because we
ingful plain descriptions of physical systems […] but which do can fail to evaluate the severity of those harms.
not describe actual systems and which would not be taken to
do so by any competent practitioner in the field” (Frigg, 2010b, Acknowledgements
p. 257, original italics). The analogy between models and fic-
tions is controversial (see Giere, 2009) but, in the context of This work was written during a visit to the Centre for
risk analysis, how could we anticipate potential harms without Philosophy of Natural and Social Sciences, London School
constructing risk models which are assumed to be fictions? of Economics and Political Sciences, supported by the
Could we make more realistic experiments intending to know grant 2017/17081-4 from São Paulo Research Foundation
the real extent of risky situations? From a descriptive point of (FAPESP). The author also acknowledges Roman Frigg and
view, fictionalism does not require from risk analysis more than Lorenzo Baravalle for making valuable suggestions to this re-
the latter can offer, namely, imaginary risk scenarios. search project.
More important, however, is the claim that “we will have
to distort the true picture of what happens if we want to fit
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6
See the legal report of Theresa Papademetriou (2014), Senior Foreign Law Specialist: “The European Union (EU) has in place a compre-
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legislation, is designed to prevent any adverse effects on the environment and the health and safety of humans and animals, and it
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7
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in literary fiction. When modeling the solar system as consisting of ten perfectly spherical spinning tops physicists describe (and take
themselves to be describing) an imaginary physical system; when considering an ecosystem with only one species, biologists describe
an imaginary population; and when investigating an economy without money and transaction costs economists describe an imaginary
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