Risk and Rationality - K. S. Shrader-Frechette

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Résumé :
Risk and Rationality: Philosophical Foundations for Populist Reforms offers a rigorous philosophical reconstruction of how societies should evaluate and govern technological hazards. K. S. Shrader-Frechette charts a middle path between cultural relativism and naive positivism, demonstrating why risk evaluation is neither a mere social construct nor a value-free technical exercise. After situating modern risk analysis in its institutional history (NEPA, OSHA, RARADA), she dissects the value judgments embedded in all three stages of assessment--identification, estimation, and evaluation--showing how methodological choices shape policy outcomes. Through targeted critiques of prevailing strategies--expert/lay splits between perceived and actual risk, probability-only decision rules, Bayesian-utilitarian maximization under deep uncertainty, producer-favoring default choices, and the isolationist discounting of Third-World harms--Shrader-Frechette argues that lay aversion to involuntary, catastrophic, or inequitably distributed risks is often more rational than experts concede.

The book's constructive core advances scientific proceduralism, a normative framework that weds empirical objectivity to democratic ethics. Risk evaluations, Shrader-Frechette contends, can be objective--insofar as they are probabilistically revisable and open to critical testing--while also answerable to principles of equity, consent, and due process. She proposes methodological reforms (ethically weighted risk-cost-benefit analysis...

Biographie:
compensation and due-process rights...

Sommaire:
performance-based ranking of expert judgments by predictive accuracy) and procedural reforms (free, informed consent for imposed risks...