Risk and Rationality: Philosophical Foundations for Populist Reforms

Risk and Rationality offers a philosophical foundation for populist reforms, challenging cultural relativism and naive positivism. It dissects the value judgments embedded in risk assessment and proposes methodological and procedural reforms to align assessment and management with public reason. It is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, commemorating the university's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact.

Format: Hardback
Length: 324 pages
Publication date: 27 May 2022
Publisher: University of California Press

Risk and Rationality: Philosophical Foundations for Populist Reforms offers a comprehensive philosophical exploration of how societies should evaluate and govern technological hazards. K. S. Shrader-Frechette presents a "middle path" between cultural relativism and naive positivism, demonstrating why risk evaluation is neither a mere social construct nor a value-free technical exercise. She traces the institutional history of modern risk analysis, including the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and the Risk Assessment and Risk Reduction Administration (RARADA), and analyzes the value judgments embedded in all three stages of assessment: identification, estimation, and evaluation. Through critical critiques of prevailing strategies, such as expert/lay splits between "perceived" and "actual" risk, probability-only decision rules, Bayesian-utilitarian maximization under deep uncertainty, producer-favoring default choices, and the "isolationist" discounting of Third-World harms, Shrader-Frechette argues that lay aversion to involuntary, catastrophic, or inequitably distributed risks is often more rational than experts concede. The book's constructive core advances "scientific proceduralism," a normative framework that combines empirical objectivity with democratic ethics. Risk evaluations, according to Shrader-Frechette, can be objective and answerable to principles of equity, consent, and due process while also being probabilistically revisable and open to critical testing. She proposes methodological reforms (ethically weighted risk-cost-benefit analysis; performance-based ranking of expert judgments by predictive accuracy) and procedural reforms (free, informed consent for imposed risks; compensation and due-process rights; market-share liability) that realign assessment and management with public reason. Bridging philosophy, law, and public policy, Risk and Rationality provides a comprehensive framework for evaluating and governing technological hazards in a way that is both ethical and effective.

Weight: 635g
Dimension: 234 x 156 x 23 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780520363700