The morality of risking: On the normative foundations of risk regulation

Risk permeates people\u27s lives, and yet the normative dimensions of risk have been largely unexamined by philosophers. The nature and moral significance of risk and the standards governing morally permissible risking are all topics that are owed careful study. In this dissertation, I use the tools of moral and legal philosophy to explicate the morality of risking, focusing on institutional actors such as government agencies, which as a matter of course regulate risk. I begin, in the first chapter, by exploring whether there is an independent morality of risking at all, examining the special moral significance of risking. I argue that risk is not itself a form of harm, but that risking others nonetheless calls for moral justification because risking involves taking someone\u27s life into one\u27s own hands and having authority over someone else. If this is what risking\u27s moral significance rests on, however, it raises acute questions about the epistemic accessibility of moral norms, which I pursue in chapter two. I argue that if morality is to retain its inherent practicality, moral norms must not outstrip people\u27s reasonable epistemic reach. On this basis, I maintain that the moral significance of risking cannot be a transcendently objective matter. In the third chapter, I advance a non-consequentialist normative framework for risk regulation. I begin with a defense of a particular form of moral justification—justification to a subject—and argue further that this form of justification limits the kinds of considerations that risk regulators may appeal to in determining government policy. Heeding this personal reasons restriction, moreover, leads to a novel principle of regulation—intrapersonal aggregation. At the end of the third and throughout the fourth chapter, I explicate and defend intrapersonal aggregation in detail, contending that it offers a plausible alternative to the consequentialism that dominates risk regulation in current governmental practice. Finally, in the dissertation\u27s appendix, I compare and contrast the position I defend and the way that I argue for it with Scanlonian contractualism