Introduction Ethical issues in risk assessment and management: a critical introduction

摘要

Throughout history, human beings have always feared the devastation that often results when nature releases its powerful forces in the form of hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, conflagrations, tornados, etc. Such events cause massive damage to life, property and nature, and humankind was right to fear them, especially since they were the single cause of more damage than anything humankind had ever encountered. Such events created great collective fear and anxiety in the people who lived through them and this led to their public acknowledgement during the times in which they occurred. The massive earthquake that struck Portugal in 1755, killing at least 60,000 people and triggering tsunamis that wrecked seaports in Portugal, Spain, and as far away as Morocco - as immortalised in Voltaire's novella Candide, or Optimism - is a case in point. In other words, nothing was more threatening than a natural disaster, rightfully thought humankind. (This fact also goes for wars too perhaps, excluding of course post 19th-century global technological warfare. In any event, warfare is clearly a 'human-made' disaster as opposed to a 'natural' disaster.)