Ethics and Risk Management,

For more than a decade, some of us have been involved in discussions and arguments about the ethics of risk management. part of the debate has been about the methods and applications of prescriptive analysis in making decisions involving public risk. By prescriptive analysis, I mean any systematic approach--it need not be quantitative--to assist risk managers in making decisions consistent with their value judgements and their information about a problem. No one could seriously object to prescriptive analysis per se, but of course, analysts must use some particular method, and different methods can raise different objections. In early days, the ethical debate focused on cost-benefit methods for assessing risks and comparing them to other values. Cost-benefit analysis is subject to a number of serious objections, which will be very briefly described in this paper