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Quantification, Regulation, and Risk Assessment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Douglas MacLean
Douglas MacLean*
Affiliation:
Center for Philosophy and Public Policy, University of Maryland
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Extract

One of the roles of government is to regulate new technologies and control the risks to life and health that they impose. This will be true according to any plausible theory of government or politics. There are many reasons for centralizing the control of technological risk. First, the problem can elude individual or decentralized solutions because the transaction costs for bargaining to take place are too high, either because many different actors each impose slight risks which are intolerable only in their aggregate, or else because one actor imposes significant risks which are distributed thinly over very many individuals. A second reason is that technological risks are often invisible, delayed, and exceptionally complex, so the costs of gathering enough information to make reasonable decisions can be so prohibitively high that they are incapable of being borne except at the most centralized levels of government where resources can be pooled.

Type
Part V. Technology and Risk Assessment
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1982 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1982 , 1982 , pp. 243 - 260
Copyright
Copyright © 1983 Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

1

My research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, grant number PRA-80-20019.

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