Morality, probability, and risk

Abstract

The paper explores the problem of discovering or creating a system of moral criteria that could regulate society’s reactions to probabilistic threats. The first part of the paper studies the capacity of the most popular normative programs of morality to provide a basis for such criteria. The author demonstrates that the ethics of absolute prohibitions, the ethics of human rights, and virtue ethics face insurmountable difficulties. Utilitarian ethics seems to be much better at integrating the probability factor into the logic of decision-making. However, despite its success, utilitarian ethics also needs a serious transformation as far as its structure and metrics are concerned. Following R. Ericson and A. Doyle, the author calls the product of such a transformation the ‘morality of responsibility and accountability’. In the second part of the paper some basic challenges to this model of morality are explored. The author argues that in order to deal with these challenges, the ‘morality of responsibility and accountability’ must 1) create a moral consciousness that would be adapted to the influence that judgments about probability of events have on the moral evaluation of actions; 2) find optimal methods to attribute the numerical probability to future events; 3) overcome psychological and cultural prejudices that affect our estimations of probability; 4) elaborate flexible formulae that discount the future, 5) form a proper reaction of society not only to risk, but also to uncertainty.