Risk, Death, and Well-Being: The Ethical Foundations of Fatality Risk Regulation

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A wide range of governmental policies characteristic of the modern state seek to reduce individuals’ fatality risks--risks that arise from air and water pollution, pathogens, food ingredients and contaminants, motor vehicles, infrastructure, radiation, workplace accidents, alcohol and recreational drugs, firearms, consumer products, tobacco, natural disasters, and other sources. Risk, Death, and Well-Being provides a rigorous treatment of the ethics of fatality risk regulation. It does so through the lens of welfare-consequentialism--specifically, lifetime welfarism, with a particular focus on utilitarianism and prioritarianism. The ethical ranking of possible worlds depends on the patterns of lifetime well-being in the worlds. Premature death is ethically significant insofar as it changes the lifetime well-being of the person who dies and perhaps others. At the level of policy choice, the book deploys the social-welfare-function (SWF) framework--which is the most systematic decision--procedure for implementing lifetime welfarism. It shows, in detail, how the SWF methodology can be brought to bear in assessing risk-regulation policies. Every individual faces a policy-specific lottery over lifetime well-being, as determined by their risk profile (probability of surviving the current year and future years) and attribute profile (the attributes the individual will have in the current year and each future year if alive rather than dead). In short, a policy corresponds to an array of individual risk and attribute profiles, which can then be assigned a utilitarian or prioritarian value. The SWF methodology as thus applied to risk regulation differs quite substantially from cost-benefit analysis (CBA), which is currently the dominant policy-assessment procedure in governmental practice.

Matthew D. Adler is Richard A. Horvitz Professor of Law and Professor of Economics, Philosophy and Public Policy at Duke University, and is the founding director of the Duke Center for Law, Economics and Public Policy. He writes at the intersection of law, moral philosophy, and welfare economics. His current research focuses on ＂prioritarianism＂--a refinement to utilitarianism that gives extra weight to the worse off. He is the author of numerous articles and books, including Well-Being and Fair Distribution: Beyond Cost-Benefit Analysis and Measuring Social Welfare: An Introduction. With Marc Fleurbaey, he edited the Oxford Handbook of Well-Being and Public Policy.