Handbook for Environmental Risk Decision Making

Values, Perceptions, and Ethics

C. Richard Cothern

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429525339
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Environmental Law
• Index: Law

This handbook describes the broad aspects of risk management involving scientific policy judgment, uncertainty analysis, perception considerations, statistical insights, and strategic thinking. This book presents all the important concepts to enable the reader to "see the big picture." This ability is extremely important - it allows the decision ma

SECTION III

Values and Value Judgments

11	INTRODUCTION TO QUANTITATIVE ISSUES

David W. Schnare

As Doug MacLean explained in his keynote presentation at the symposium from which this text arose (Chapter 13), “the undeniable truth is that we must make trade-offs between risks and between methods of risk reduction.” To do so, we have to describe the risks around us and make choices on how to deal with them. As the previous section of this volume makes clear, assessments and judgments are inevitably value laden. As well, they will always reflect the moral suasion of those involved. The challenge is whether to expose these values and morals, and if so, how to do so.

In Chapter 14, James Nash announces that risk assessment and risk management are considerably more than a scientific enterprise. They are value laden and not morally neutral. He argues that to ignore implicit values and moral assumptions is to miss a considerable perspective on decisions. In fact, it is to ignore the question of ethics in decision making.

Nash suggests that to incorporate ethics it will be necessary not only to expose the value base implicit in assessments and decisions, but to expand them beyond those typically applied using traditional assessment and management tools like animal studies and benefit-cost analysis. He highlights four value considerations that are often bypassed or underemphasized in risk analysis. Three of these reflect the issue of distributive justice, going well beyond justice among people to the question of “biotic justice”.

While rich with insights on the need for consideration of ethics in risk assessment and management, Nash’s contribution also offers a practical direction to ensure this gets done. He suggests that evaluations cannot be restricted solely to scientific peer review. Some form of public involvement and evaluation, particularly by ethicists, is essential to expand the value base and ensure consideration of ethics.

In Chapter 15, Christopher Paterson and Richard Andrews offer a review on efforts to implement the Nash dictum to broaden the value base when making decisions on risk. Tracing the use of risk assessment under real world conditions, this chapter revolves around the fact that choices must be made. Thus, risk assessment is translated into “Comparative Risk Assessment”, to allow consideration of alternative risks and alternative solutions.

Paterson and Andrews describe the mechanisms for incorporation of public values into assessments and decisions. These methods significantly altered the assessment and decision-making processes in cases where public involvement was used. For example, the list of risky concerns deserving public attention often grew. Threats not typically considered by the scientific risk assessment community, but added by the public, were uncontrolled population growth, urbanization, consumptive lifestyles, and lack of environmental awareness. In like measure, public participants expanded the list of potential risk reduction options.

To the risk assessor, the challenge of an expanded value base is the challenge of how to present and display values, morals, and ethics in terms that effectively characterize risks, options, and the meaning of choices. Resha Putzrath’s chapter (Chapter 17) describes the most common challenge — the selection, comparison, and combination of information on value judgments where data are numeric and must be combined or directly compared.

This chapter discusses the breadth of the presentation problem, giving clear announcement of the complexity and size of the challenge. There are cases where data cannot be combined and other cases where values are difficult to present numerically. Putzrath offers suggestions on how to attack these problems using nonquantitative means that maintain distinctions between options, yet characterize the diversity of values involved.

Putzrath and Nash both highlight the case where there is significant uncertainty inherent in risk assessment and risk management. Nash eschews the use of benefit-cost analysis because it does not provide for an exposition of the values associated with uncertainty. Putzrath recognizes that there are cases where uncertainty bars the use of quantitative data. The chapter offered by David Schnare assembles a series of analytical cases that addresses both of these problems.

Schnare (Chapter 16) begins from the point that often more is known about the uncertainty surrounding data than the actual condition data are intended to represent. Demonstrating the use of Monte-Carlo analysis, it is possible to identify cases where uncertainty is clearly too great to permit differentiation between risks or options. In other cases, however, differences between risks are so large that even quite uncertain data are useful in describing risks.

This chapter also presents examples of how to ensure that common values are not ignored or forgotten in assessments with highly uncertain and complex data. Schnare suggests asking, for example, what ethics must be applied when seeking to impose a mandate requiring the investment of billions of dollars so as to delay a single death by one year.

Schnare and Nash recognize, however, that the calculus of risk management does not adequately calculate certain types of outcomes — especially intergenerational effects. In a chapter that is as much philosophical as quantitative (Chapter 12), Bryan Norton carefully examines the differences between the question of human risks and the more complex issue of ecological health.

Like Nash, Norton suggests that economic analysis fails to reflect concerns that stretch over long time periods and affect several generations. Norton argues for a multivalued multitiered assessment approach that better captures the contextual pluralism of the public. His special concerns are for values associated with long periods of time (generations) or large areas (global).

Norton’s chapter raises the need to distinguish between having many tools and having useful tools. When a tool like economics ignores some values, new tools are needed. When a tool such as a public referendum captures values, but does so implicitly rather than explicitly, new tools may also be needed. Norton provides the outlines of a new way to clearly display risk information about time and space in a manner that can significantly inform the public and the decision maker.

The limitations of any text preclude a definitive treatment of how to incorporate ethics, morals and values into risk assessment. Nevertheless, this section provides a strong introduction to the mechanics of how values can be incorporated into risk assessment and risk management. The serious student will find this chapter is a doorway to more honest, fair, and sensible analysis.

12	ECOLOGICAL RISK ASSESSMENT: TOWARD A BROADER ANALYTIC FRAMEWORK

Bryan G. Norton

CONTENTS

Introduction: Risk and Risk Models

Multitiered Systems of Analysis

Scaling Social Values

Risk Decision Squares as a Multiscalar Method of Valuation

A Lexicographic, Scale-Sensitive System of Policy Analysis

Conclusion

References

INTRODUCTION: RISK AND RISK MODELS

The term “risk” has two lives. On the one hand it is, in ordinary language, a useful, catchall term, somewhat vague in its application, but directing our attention to a class of situations in which uncertainty and danger are both well represented. However, “risk” is also a term in environmental and health policy discussions, and in this context the term has taken on a quite different life as a technical term that is defined precisely within carefully calibrated scientific models for risk assessment. This duality is not a problem, as long as we remember that no technically defined concept of risk can ever capture all of the richness of the ordinary concept — some models will capture some aspects of risk, some will capture others, but the ordinary concept involves complexities that cannot be fully comprehended in any single model. It is therefore not possible to identify and support a single risk model as the exclusively correct one. The best we can hope for is to construct a variety of risk analysis models, to be as precise as possible in developing them, and to learn what we can from a variety of models under diverse applications. It must always be remembered that we are not looking for the “right” risk model, but rather the model that will illuminate risk as it is addressed in particular contexts, and for the insight that can be gained by looking at a complex thing through multiple lenses.

In this paper I will contrast two broad types of risk assessment models, single-tiered and multitiered models, noting that most models hitherto have been single tiered in an important sense. All values countenanced in currently used systems of analysis keep accounts only of “present values” — preferences which are insensitive to changes in temporal scale. They have analyzed risk within a single spatiotemporal dimension and these systems therefore have a characteristic I will refer to as “nonscalar”. Nonscalar systems do not necessarily deny the importance of impacts on future generations, but they require that these impacts be valued in a metric that makes them commensurate with present values. Concern for future generations is therefore expressed as what the present is willing to pay to protect the interests of future persons. I will argue that nonscalar approaches to risk assessment, while they have been useful in understanding and measuring risk to human life and health, will not prove adequate to characterize or analyze longer-term risks to ecological systems. There have been a few promising attempts to develop two- or multitiered systems, and this paper continues the work of Talbot Page and others who have developed such systems (Page, 1977; 1991; Norton, 1990, 1991; Toman, 1994). Discussions of ecosystem health and integrity often assume, implicitly, a multitiered system in that these management criteria have not been (and probably cannot be) stated in a single-scaled system of value. (See, for example, Costanza, Norton, and Haskell, 1992; Edwards and Regier, 1990.) My approach differs, however, from integrity theorists such as Laura Westra (Westra, 1994), who believe that the concept of integrity must be given a nonanthropocentric interpretation. By contrast to Westra, I will offer a multitiered system of analysis which takes account of human values and risks to them in multiple scales of space and time. I will characterize and evaluate changes in ecosystem states from a human, but multigenerational, viewpoint. This alternative approach is based on a more pluralistic conception of human values and of risks and attempts to develop alternative risk-decision criteria that are applicable in different situations. While the approach proposed is admittedly pluralistic, it is not relativistic or nihilistic; I believe that there are good reasons to guide choices as to which criterion is applicable in particular situations. This form of pluralism is best described as “contextual” or “integrated” pluralism; it applies different criteria according to a rational assessment of the relevant characteristics of a risk encountered in specific contexts.

MULTITIERED SYSTEMS OF ANALYSIS

Risk analysis as practiced thus far has mainly employed a conception of value based in individual welfare, which is not surprising, given the usual focus on human health effects of exposures to pollutants. According to this conception, an increment of risk of a negative outcome is always and by definition a decrement in the expected welfare of some human individual or individuals. Conversely, a decrement in such a risk is an increment in expected welfare of individuals. This definitional connection characterizes the nonscalar nature of current risk decision making. This connection is possible because the whole system assumes a utilitarian, welfare-based definition of value. This type of analysis has the advantage that information about risks can be aggregated with other forms of information about welfare, providing a single accounting system for risks and other types of costs and benefits. Those who favor the economic conception of decision making can thereby achieve a further simplification — the degree of perceived risk can be measured as the willingness of an informed “consumer” to pay for decrements of risk. This simply elegant theoretical framework provides a definition of risk that makes risk measurable in ways that encourage integration of risk calculations into welfare economics. It also has the unquestioned advantage that representations of risk can be registered and aggregated within a monolithic system of values which are all commensurate.

Theoretical elegance can mask important complexities, and I question whether a nonscalar value analysis can be adequate to the task of ecological risk assessment. I begin by establishing that there is an important disanalogy between tools available to analyze risk to human health and those available to analyze ecological risk: human health risks can be understood as directly related to human welfare, whereas ecosystem risks are related only indirectly to the welfare of individuals (at least given currently available analytic techniques). It is possible, in principle at least, to gather scientific evidence to establish links in a causal chain that connects a discharge of a chemical into the environment, for example, to an exposure of a population to the chemical and eventually to an increase in human illness. Since nobody questions that human illness or death is a bad thing, changes in the physical world such as increased concentrations of a toxic chemical in a city’s water supply can thus be directly linked to an unquestioned value — individual human welfare. This is not, of course, to say that it is easy to trace such a causal chain or that it can be accomplished without important assumptions, but only th...