A virtue ethical account of making decisions about risk

The Journal of Risk Research - Special edition on the philosophy of risk with guest editors:Martin Peterson University of Cambridge and Per SandinRoyal Institute of Technology, Stockholm

The Journal of Risk Research - Special edition on the philosophy of risk with guest editors:

Martin Peterson (University of Cambridge) and Per Sandin(Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm)

Article Title: [A virtue ethical account of making decisions about risk]

Abstract

Most discussions of risk are developed in broadly consequentialist terms, focusing

on the outcomes of risks as such This paper will provide an alternative account of risk

from a virtue ethical perspective, shifting the focus on the decision to take the risk Making

ethical decisions about risk is, we will argue, not fundamentally about the actual chain of events that the decision sets in process, but about the reasonableness of the decision to take the risk in the first place A virtue ethical account of risk is needed because the notion of the

‘reasonableness’ of the decision to take the risk is affected by the complexity of the moral status of particular instances of risk-taking and the risk-taker’s responsiveness to these contextual features The very idea of ‘reasonable risk’ welcomes judgments about the nature of the risk itself, raises questions about complicity, culpability and responsibility, while at its heart, involves a judgement about the justification of risk which unavoidably

focuses our attention on the character of the individuals involved in risk making decisions

Keywords: Risk; ethics; morality; responsibility; virtue; choice; reasons

A Virtue Ethical Account of Making Decisions about Risk

Introduction

Risk becomes a prospect when an agent is exposed to the need to make decisions in

conditions of uncertainty – she does not know and cannot reliably predict which of a range

of consequences her action will have Risk-taking is potentially morally problematic because agents take risks intentionally knowing that they are risks but at the same time theyare not in control of the consequences of their actions So a question arises concerning the extent to which the uncertainty inherent in risk-taking insulates agents from responsibility

In this paper we will seek to answer that question and we will draw on virtue ethics to do

so

Before we begin it is worth making some clarificatory comments about the sort of risks in which we are interested Nicholas Rescher makes a useful distinction between risks

we face and risks we take, e.g those involving choices with respect to the risk (Rescher

1983, 5-6) An example of the first kind of risk are natural disasters The risk of a natural

disaster is out of our control, as we cannot control the occurrence of such risks However,

we have control over the extent to which we manage these risks For example, we have no

control over the amount of rainfall in any given year, but we can control whether we build houses in flood plains that are likely to be severely affected in years when rainfall is above average The second kind of risk involves a decision as to whether to expose ourselves to this risk, e.g accepting the risks of building in a flood plain has an element of control which is missing from being subject to the effects of heavy rainfall as such Our analysis

will focus on the second kinds of risks and the judgement of agents regarding whether to expose themselves (and others) to these risks, as these are the risk-making decisions we canhold agents responsible for.

Predominantly, the literature on risk takes a consequentialist approach, justifying or criticising risk taking action retrospectively depending on whether the risk actualised or not However, in our view, risk decisions are not fundamentally about what does happen Rather, the important considerations take place at the time of making the decision to risk, atthe time when risk and the steps that will be taken to manage it are chosen So the focus of moral attention should be on that reasonableness - something which is under the agent’s control - rather than on the results of risk, which are outside of the agent’s control The attempt to arrive at judgements of reasonableness will, in turn, focus attention upon the risk-taker as an intentional agent and in particular on said agent’s attitude towards risk taking and sensitivity to the context in which risks are taken, all of which will reflect her moral character

This paper will focus upon what makes risk-taking decisions reasonable It will alsoargue that the moral status of particular instances of risk-taking will depend upon features

of the risk-taker, a broader range of contextual features than the objective probability of desired/undesired consequences, and, crucially, the responsiveness of the risk-taker to thesecontextual features This being the case, it will follow that it is impossible to give a

generalised account of the ethics of risk-taking or provide a formula for assigning moral responsibility/blame for the consequences of risk-taking Risk taking will be best

categorised as virtuous or vicious and only derivatively as right or wrong Good risks will those that exemplify responsiveness to morally significant features of the context of risk-

taking and phronesis, the Aristotelian understanding of practical wisdom So reasonable

risks will turn out to be the sorts of risks that a virtuous person would take and

responsibility for risk will be determinable by reference to what a virtuous person would

have chosen and why, i.e in accordance with the orthos logos

Section 1: Some background on virtue

Virtue ethics is a term used to describe a collection of theories that prioritise the role

of character in moral behaviour Such theories hold that the appropriate focus of moral evaluation is character (a complex entity comprised of many faculties and capacities) Characters are not right or wrong in the way that actions are, rather they exemplify virtues and vices Contemporary virtue ethics became a significant voice amongst moral theories after the publication of Elizabeth Anscombe’s ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ in 1958

Anscombe critiqued deontological and consequentialist approaches to ethics and advocated revisiting the work of the ancient Greek philosophers Anscombe’s critique was reinforced and developed in the work of Bernard Williams1 Contemporary virtue ethics draws its primary inspiration from the works of Aristotle and most contemporary virtue theories can fairly be described as Aristotelian2 In this paper we will draw directly upon Aristotle’s account of ethics and virtue In the rest of this section we will very briefly sketch the elements of Aristotle’s account of virtue that will be significant in our discussion of risk

1 Particularly in his 1985 Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy

2 For a more detailed account of the differences between theories see the editors’ introduction to Crisp, R and

Slote Virtue Ethics One notable exception is the work of Michael Slote, which especially in later versions

draws inspiration from Hume, while other authors have drawn inspiration from diverse sources on the virtues, e.g Christine Swanton’s Nietzschean virtue ethics.

Aristotle argues that a good human life is one which is actively rational [1097a15]

and in the rest of the Nicomachean Ethics (NE) proceeds to give a very rich and subtle

account of the various activities of the soul and how they can be, in their own characteristic ways, 'in accordance with reason' Because the human soul is complex and multi-functionaldifferent aspects of it have different targets or aims and consequently, there are different ways in which the activity of a soul can be called good or virtuous One element of the soul

is the part that is involved in producing action – the practical part and that part when it functions well exhibits practical virtue It is this aspect of the soul that would have a primary (but not exclusive) role in making decisions about when it is appropriate to take a risk

Aristotle defines what we will be calling practical virtue as follows:

“Virtue, then, is a state of character concerned with choice, lying in a mean i.e the

mean relative to us, this being determined by a rational principle (orthos logos) and by that principle by which the man of virtue (phronimos) would determine it” [1106b36]

On this view, virtue concerns motives – the forces that move us to action3- however,

it is not the motives themselves that are virtuous or vicious [1105b28] Rather it is the sensitivity of the person who experiences them, his/her capacity to be moved by them in particular circumstances that can be described as virtuous or vicious This is where reason

comes in – the virtuous person is reasonably moved by the sorts of basic motives that

Aristotle considers Reasonableness is relative to the nature of the situation faced and will

3 Aristotle takes these to be emotions like fear and greed rather than the more straightforwardly propositional attitudes like desires

be reflected by the achievement in action of a balance between the extremes of excess and deficiency in the relevant emotion, each of which represents different sorts of vice

Aristotle considers the palette of human emotions with which he is familiar and defines a set of practical virtues accordingly So we get courage as the sensitivity

/responsiveness to fear which is the mean, while cowardice and rashness are the two vices

of excess and deficiency that fall on either side Which particular action is virtuous will depend upon the agent, the circumstances in which she acts etc So we cannot say, for example, that as a general rule, running away from a lion is either cowardly or courageous

or similarly that facing a lion is either courageous or rash To run into the lion enclosure at the zoo in order to impress one’s friends seems rash, while to stand one’s ground against a lion to allow one’s children to get to safety seems courageous

The above is a brief and incomplete sketch of the nature of virtue We cannot hope

to give a complete and detailed account of this complex area of theory here4 Our claim in this paper is that evaluations of decisions to risk should be based on the reasons for the virtuous agent’s decision Only once we understand what a virtuous person would do we can begin the process of assigning praise, blame and responsibility To develop the account further we need to be able to say more about the sorts of reasons virtuous agents do and do not have to take risks and before we can do that we need to turn our attention to the nature

of risk and risking

Section 2: A preliminary definition of risk

4 Those interested in exploring virtue theory, its various forms and its relation to other contemporary ethical

theories are referred to Athanassoulis, N ‘Virtue Ethics’ in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

http://www.iep.utm.edu/v/virtue.htm

The standard understanding of risk portrays it as having two key elements: action in the face of probabilistically modelled uncertainty concerning outcome (chance) and the idea of loss (negativity) (Rescher 1983, 5) The latter includes direct loss or harm, but also the inverted risk of giving up on something good5 We would like to broaden the focus of moral assessment beyond probability and consequences To appreciate the significance of other considerations we need to pay serious attention to the definition of risk

In our view, risk needs to be defined in two stages Stage 1: It ought to be noted that all cases of risk are characterised by a very specific set of circumstances in which they occur – risk arises when a set of statements like the following are all true:

1 Someone (S) is considering performing act A

2 S is not in complete control of the outcome of A – there are a number of possibleoutcomes of doing A

3 However S is able to, roughly, estimate the likelihood that her action will have one or other of the range of possible outcomes

4 Some of the outcomes of A are desirable (either to S or to others) and other potential outcomes are undesirable (either to S or to others) [the desirable and undesirable outcomes need not be mutually exclusive and they may also only bedesirable or undesirable relative to one another]

5 The prospect of achieving the good outcomes of A represents a significant enough reason for S to discount or weigh less heavily the potential bad

outcomes of A

5 This appears to be Rescher’s view.

Consider a gambler, for example, who considers placing a bet, knowing that she may or may not win, that there is nothing she can do influence the outcome and that the probability that she will win is, say, 1% The fact that she is even considering betting demonstrates that she considers the prospect of winning (despite its unlikelihood) to be a reasonable justification for placing the bet She chooses within the circumstances of risk

Note the importance of choice and control in this account of risk; the very first

element in the account above involves considering performing an act It is because risking

is a choice that agents can be held accountable for whether they take risks in an considered manner or not, for their decision to walk or not walk away from risk, etc.Choosing is within their control, it is only the outcome of risk decisions that agents are not

ill-in control of, not the risk decisions themselves Choices are made for reasons and virtuouschoices are those that are made for good reasons Right choices in the circumstances ofrisk will be those that would have been taken by a virtuous person because they are those

which are in accordance with the orthos logos as determined by phronesis

Stage 2: Risking occurs when an agent in the circumstances of risk makes and acts

on a decision and a process begins which will eventually give rise to one or other of the

potential outcomes (described in characterising the circumstances of risk) is realised Soour gambler places her bet, the wheel is spun Once again it is worth emphasising here thecentrality of choice Ordinarily, choosers are morally responsible for what they choose andour contention is that choosers of risk ought not to be an exception to this policy

In this paper we are specifically interested in choices that involve risk to others.Making decisions about risks to oneself is a fruitful area for discussion but it is outside the

scope of this paper and in addition we wish to side-step further questions about the relativeweight of self-regarding versus other-regarding considerations.

Section 3: What is morally significant about considering and choosing to risk?

The choice to risk is morally significant because risking is a kind of action that involves persons – and persons are valuable and worthy of concern There are three main roles that persons might occupy in any instance of risk-taking:

1 The Decision Maker: the person(s) who has the information about the elements

of the decision, weights up the alternatives and comes to a decision about whether the risk is worth entering into or not

2 The Harm Bearer: the person(s) who runs the risk of bearing (or bears) the cost

of the decision, i.e the person who is at ‘harm’s way’ because of the decision

3 The Potential Beneficiary: the person(s) who runs the chance of gaining (or gains) from the decision, i.e the person who may benefit from the decision.Any one person may occupy more than one of these roles, but there may be

situations where different individuals occupy these three roles (and even more than one person for each) If one person occupies all three roles, matters are less problematic from amoral perspective There tends to be a liberal presumption in favour of deferring to an individual risk-taker when it comes to assessing the reasonableness of risks that affect only herself We are inclined to accept her reasons for risking are not trivial to her – that is, to

accept that the risk concerned is a necessary part of her pursuit of her own rational plan of life Making risk decisions which impact upon others is evidently more problematic as it involves the extra responsibility of how one person’s decisions affect another The fact thatthe decision to risk is taken in the knowledge that others are being made party to the risk focuses our moral attention upon the reasons the risk-taker has for risking Situations whereone person is both the decision maker and stands to benefit, whereas another person is risking being harmed, are clearly the most problematic (Rescher 1983, 160-162)

It is also worth noting that some risk decisions have an identified risk/gains bearer whereas others may have an unknown target That is, some decisions will be made in the knowledge that they run the risk of affecting an identifiable individual, e.g the particular patient on the operating table runs the risk of the surgeon’s clinical decisions during the surgery, whereas some decisions will be made with a statistical probability that someone may be harmed/benefited but without knowing who that individual will be, e.g many people will buy a faulty product the company knowingly sold, but only some of them will experience the fault and only some of those will be harmed as a result (it may be that at the time of making this decision it is known that 1% of users are likely to experience the fault, but it is now known who these 1% are) Finally, some risks may be negligible at lower levels, but a have a kind of ‘threshold effect’6, so that over a period of time the next act imposes a much more significant risk than the original one In these cases there is a long interval between the act of risking and the realization of bad consequences and all sorts of potential compounding or diluting influences which may come into play, some of which

6 This point is nicely made by Thompson, 1986, p 175, using the example of smoking in the presence of another person.

will be under the control of the person affected e.g in the case of passive smoker attending cancer screening programmes regularly In such cases moral assessment of the act of the risk-taking action is complicated by different interpretations of the extent of the harms that the potential risk-taker is considering imposing upon the harm-bearer In other cases e.g risking the environmental impact of dumping effluent in rivers, the persons who are the harm bearers may be members of future generations So the task of moral evaluation can

be complicated by questions regarding the extent to which how much consideration is due

to currently non-existent harm-bearers7

We wish to emphasise here that what is morally significant i.e what should be the focuses of moral evaluation, is not the fact that persons are exposed to harm but rather the

facts that a decider considers exposing those persons (self or third parties) to harm when she considers taking a risk and that she chooses to expose persons to possible harms when

she actively takes a risk

If our assessments of risk focus exclusively on the results of risk, we entirely disregard the reasons why the risk was taken in the first place An act is reasonable if chosen on defensible grounds, regardless of whether the actual results are those expected or

not It is the nature of risk, as we saw above, that we cannot guarantee the results of the action, but this is reason to place less or none rather than all of the weight on an evaluation

of these results when seeking to form a moral judgement of the risk-taking act

What distinguishes deliberation and choices about risk from deliberation and choicemore generally is they way in which the deliberator/chooser responds to and reasons within

7 For a more detailed discussion see Shrader-Frechette 2000, 771-8

a context of uncertainty We will maintain, in what follows, that how she ought to respond

to uncertainty will depend upon a range of subject and context specific factors and that our judgements concerning how she ought to respond to uncertainty will depend upon what we think a virtuous person would do in her circumstances or the ways in which a less than virtuous person would fail in acting virtuously

Section 4: Risk and Responsibility

An ethical standpoint which foregrounds choice usually couches its judgements in terms of responsibility Other things being equal we are usually held responsible for the actions we freely choose to do We have suggested above that we think choices to risk ought not to be an exception to this rule This emphasis on right and wrong choices and the associated moral responsibility might seem a little strange for a paper that purports to betaking a virtue ethics approach to the subject of risk It is worth remembering though that the concepts of right and wrong are not inaccessible to the virtue theorist We take it that the difference between a virtue and a non-virtue theory is that the former takes right and wrong to be dependent upon virtue – not in the sense that one can only act rightly if one is virtuous but in the sense that we cannot understand or explain the rightness of action without appeal to virtue of character

The main contention of this paper is that when we consider risk we should not judgeagents based on the consequences of their actions, rather we should judge agents on the reasonableness of their decision to take the risk Virtue theory requires us to take seriously the reasonableness of people’s decisions when making moral evaluations of risk-taking

Agents who take appropriate risks for the right reasons will be virtuous and deserving of moral praise At this point, however, virtue ethics diverges from standard act-focused moral

theories According to the virtue theorist moral praise is only due to the virtuous person,

that is, the person who does the right thing for the right reason, knowingly, for its own sake and with the right emotion There are many other agents who may do the right thing but for whom no praise is due, for example the continent agent who performs the right act but after

a struggle against contrary emotions, or the agent who accidentally and unknowingly

‘stumbles’ upon the right thing to do, and so on

We can use the example of what the virtuous agent does and why he does so to illuminate how we should make decisions about risk In studying examples of virtue we

come to understand more about the orthos logos in accordance with which they act and

which is constitutive of virtue We can also gain insight into the sort of reasoning that leads

to worthy risk-taking by reference to the many ways in which those who are less than virtuous get things wrong, as knowing what to avoid is as useful as knowing what to aim for Consider our gambler above, call her agent S Say that agent S is faced with a choice – bet half her salary on the horses or spend it on paying for food and utility bills for her children S may not be virtuous but can still do as a virtuous person would do in the same circumstances – take only those risks that a virtuous person would take – in this case she would choose in favour of the paying for food and bills, because it is unreasonable to gamble with basic necessities such as food, heating and water on behalf of those for whom she has a duty to care, her children for the small chance of winning at the races Were she totake this risk she would show herself to be irresponsible and uncaring, were she to pass on the bet she would be acting consistently with the demands of virtue However, how it

comes about that she makes this choice need not feature in the basic moral evaluation of her

action but it does feature in the moral evaluation of her character She is responsible for

the risk-taking and whether she deserves praise or censure depends only upon her reason for making the choice she did It does not matter whether the horse wins (she becomes rich and offers her children a better life) or loses (she fails to meet the children’s basic needs), what matters is what characteristics she exemplifies in the choice she makes

Our account of the rightness or wrongness of risk-taking and our assignments ofresponsibility to risk-takers will be only as good as our ability to acquire some insight intothe nature of virtuous risk-taking In addition, we want to do more than just judge S’s action

we want to hold her responsible for it as the action proceeding from her decision In order

to understand this we have to understand why choosing to risk or refusing to risk in this

particular case would be virtuous

So we have developed a clear sense in which agents can and should be held

responsible for the risks they take and noted that we think this should be the norm

Significant space in the literature has been devoted to consideration of the apparently anomalous fact that in our daily lives we do not always criticize or censure risk-takers for the risks they take It would seem that there is a common-sense distinction that we readily make between morally acceptable and unacceptable risks and in what follows we would like to explore that distinction and explain how it is accommodated by our account of morally justifiable/worthy risks