Joshua Menkes

Risk evaluation and management

This book presents the cooperative efforts of political scientists, philosophers, policy analysts, and other specialists from many fields, in the social and behavioral study of issues in risk management and risk evaluation. Topics covered include the psychometric study of risk perception, risk, rationalism, and rationality, methods for comparing the risks of technologies, improving risk analysis, alternative risk management policies for state and loval governments, the management of risk, and science and analysis: roles in risk and decision making.

Limits of Rationality

It is hard for me to decide whether I should be elated or depressed by the fact that over 2000 years ago, Aristotle had already thought about the problem that I am addressing now, which is more or less the relationship of rationality and ethics. He not only thought about it but also achieved insights to which we have found it difficult to add. In his analysis he separated ethics from politics in explicit recognition of the dialectic tension between the man and the citizen—between the particular and the universal. In Aristotle’s own words (or rather in W.D. Ross’ translation): If the state cannot be entirely composed of good men, and yet each citizen is expected to do his own business well, and must therefore have virtue, still, inasmuch as all citizens cannot be alike, the virtue of the citizen and the good man cannot coincide. All must have the virtue of the good citizen—thus, and thus only, can the state be perfect; but they will not have the virtue of a good man, unless we assume that in a good state all the citizens must be good (1).

Technology assessment and risk analysis

Abstract The evolution of technology assessment from cost-benefit calculus to a sophisticated form of policy analysis has gone through at least three and possibly four stages. These stages, characterized by the degree of comprehensiveness aspired by the natural affinity of risk analysis to technology assessment, are explored in some detail, and it is postulated that risk analysis might very well follow a similar evolutionary path.

Justice and fairness in the technological order

Abstract I shall endeavor to demonstrate in this paper that splitting human activities into technology as distinct from society is of dubious heuristic value and has even less epistemological justification. Ontological arguments for the existence of a reified technology inexorably lead to unsuccessful attempts to explain the processes of social change in an ahistoric manner. Habermas observes that such explanations are grounded in the proposition that the practical mastery of history can be reduced to technical control of objectified processes. I shall demonstrate that hyphenating technology to society surrenders the opportunity to arrive rationally and publicly at agreement about societal goals and purposes. I maintain that the pseudoissue of technology versus society obscure the genuine issue of distributive justice. I reject John Rawlss axiomatic derivation of ahistoric principles of distributive justice in favor of Hegels historically grounded deontology. The practical conclusions are that an incrementalistic approach, based on historical conflict resolution patterns for a given social system , while not elegant, probably is the closest that conflict resolution comes to a rational process.

Value and Function of Information in Risk Management

The motto “Better Living Through Chemistry” has its darker side as we discover the unwanted consequences of some very desirable applications of many pesticides, preservatives, and pharmaceuticals. The hazard that we encounter are in the form of toxicity, carcinogenicity, and mutagenicity. The hazards with their associated risks range from the negligible to substantial increases over standard morbidity and mortality.