Technology assessment between risk, uncertainty and ignorance

  • The use of most if not all technologies is accompanied by negative side effects, While we may profit from today’s technologies, it is most often future generations who bear most risks. Risk analysis therefore becomes a delicate issue, because future risks often cannot be assigned a meaningful occurance probability. This paper argues that technology assessement most often deal with uncertainty and ignorance rather than risk when we include future generations into our ethical, political or juridal thinking. This has serious implications as probabilistic decision approaches are not applicable anymore. I contend that a virtue ethical approach in which dianoetic virtues play a central role may supplement a welfare based ethics in order to overcome the difficulties in dealing with uncertainty and ignorance in technology assessement.

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Metadaten
Author:Rafaela Hillerbrand
URN:urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-249367
Parent Title (English):25th IVR World Congress: Law, Science and Technology Frankfurt am Main 15–20 August 2011 ; Paper Series ; 078
Series (Serial Number):25th IVR World Congress: Law, Science and Technology Frankfurt am Main 15–20 August 2011 ; Paper Series (078)
Publisher:Goethe-Univ.
Place of publication:Frankfurt am Main
Document Type:Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Year of Completion:2012
Year of first Publication:2012
Publishing Institution:Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg
Release Date:2012/08/10
Tag:climate change; decision theory; ethics; expected utility; intergenerational justice; risk; technology assessment; uncertainty; virtue
HeBIS-PPN:344415031
Institutes:Rechtswissenschaft / Rechtswissenschaft
Dewey Decimal Classification:3 Sozialwissenschaften / 34 Recht / 340 Recht
Sammlungen:Universitätspublikationen
Licence (German):License LogoDeutsches Urheberrecht