Risk and Injustice

Abstract

Most human activities involve some risk-taking, and often those who end up suffering the negative effects are not the same who created risk in the first place. This means that most of our activities imply imposing risk on others. As such, risk imposition constitutes a distinct way of treating people and plays an important in determining what we owe to them. Thus, a fundamental problem for political theorists and policy makers alike is to establish when imposing risk on some people is legitimate and on what grounds. The answer to these questions touches upon some more practical issues such as how risk management is conceived, how risk regulation is implemented, what patterns of risk distribution are favoured, when the burdens of risk should be shouldered by individuals and when they should be socialised. The aim of this workshop is to explore the way our understanding of risk and risk management sheds light on our awareness and perception of injustice. To give but some examples, the aim of risk regulation is not confined to the minimization of health or safety setbacks, but often includes considerations of justice and distributive fairness. The literature on environmental risk has drawn attention to the geographical distribution of pollutants and toxic waste sites, which tend to produce income and racially skewed pattern of death, illness and other welfare setback, and to the need for addressing distributive questions in risk regulation. Similarly, the ongoing economic crisis has revealed that risk can have different impact on various populations groups, and that the least responsible are the worst affected and the least able to cope with the effects of the crisis. This not only raises distributive concerns, but also points at the quality of the relations between people in a society where some population groups are affected by precarious work and economic insecurity. Issues of international terrorism point to possible trade-offs between public security and freedom to take risk. Questions of interest include, but are not limited to: - What is the ethical and political relevance of risk imposition? - How much risk (and what instances of risk taking actions) can be acceptable in a just society? - Considering the wide variety of risks, how can appropriate precautionary measures be established? - What makes specific population groups particularly vulnerable to risk exposure? - What can be the appropriate criteria for distributing risk across society? - How it is possible to compensate for risk-related injustice? The proposed panel takes issue with those questions by looking at different instances of risk especially in the fields of the financial markets, precarious work, environmental pollution and public security.