How Fair Is Safe Enough? The Cultural Approach to Societal Technology Choice¹

TLDR

The paper presents a philosophical critique of the National Academy’s two‑stage risk model and includes a pilot study. It argues that societal risk is fundamentally about social relations, proposing the fairness hypothesis. The authors outline an approach that prioritizes societal preferences for consent, liability distribution, and institutional trust, focusing on conflict rather than probability. A pilot study applying the fairness hypothesis to new nuclear technologies illustrates this perspective.

Abstract

This paper consists of an argument and a pilot study. First is a general, perhaps philosophical, argument against the National Academy's viewpoint (1) that dealing with risk is a two‐stage process consisting of (a) assessment of facts, and (b) evaluation of facts in sociopolitical context. We argue that societal risk intrinsically revolves around social relations as much as around evaluations of probability. Second, we outline one particular approach to analyzing societal risk management styles. We call this the fairness hypothesis. Rather than focusing on probabilities and magnitudes of undesired events, this approach emphasizes societal preferences for principles of achieving consent to a technology, distributing liabilities, and investing trust in institutions. Conflict rather than probability is the chief focus of this approach to societal risk management. This view is illustrated by a recent empirical pilot study that explored the fairness hypothesis in the context of new nuclear technologies.