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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| 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): |  Deutsches Urheberrecht |
