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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.
Prior research suggests that those who rely on intuition rather than effortful reasoning when making decisions are less averse to risk and ambiguity. The evidence is largely correlational, however, leaving open the question of the direction of causality. In this paper, we present experimental evidence of causation running from reliance on intuition to risk and ambiguity preferences. We directly manipulate participants’ predilection to rely on intuition and find that enhancing reliance on intuition lowers the probability of being ambiguity averse by 30 percentage points and increases risk tolerance by about 30 percent in the experimental sub-population where we would a priori expect the manipulation to be successful(males).