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Emotions and Risky Technologies

  • Book
  • © 2010

Overview

Editors:
  1. Sabine Roeser

    1. Dept. Philosophy, Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands

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  • The first book to address the new topic of moral emotions about risky technologies
  • Brings together empirical and normative-ethical viewpoints about risk and emotion
  • Brings together leading scholars from philosophy and psychology who work on (moral) emotions and/or risk

Part of the book series: The International Library of Ethics, Law and Technology (ELTE, volume 5)

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Table of contents (14 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xxxii
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  2. Part I: Emotions as Distortions about Risk

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 1-1
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    2. Moral Heuristics and Risk

      • Cass R. Sunstein
      Pages 3-16

    3. Here’s How I Feel: Don’t Trust Your Feelings!

      • Ronald de Sousa
      Pages 17-35

    4. If I Look at the Mass I Will Never Act: Psychic Numbing and Genocide

      • Paul Slovic
      Pages 37-59

    5. Marketing Risk: Emotional Appeals Can Promote the Mindless Acceptance of Risk

      • Ross Buck, Whitney A. Davis
      Pages 61-80

    6. Emotions as Aids and Obstacles in Thinking About Risky Technologies

      • Dylan Evans
      Pages 81-88

  3. Part II: Emotions and Virtues in Risk Assessment

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 89-89
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    2. Risk Assessment as Virtue

      • Sabine Döring, Fritz Feger
      Pages 91-105

    3. Emotions and Judgments About Risk

      • Robert C. Roberts
      Pages 107-126

    4. The Moral Risks of Risky Technologies

      • Peter Goldie
      Pages 127-138

    5. Ethical Imagination: Broadening Laboratory Deliberations

      • Simone van der Burg
      Pages 139-155

  5. Back Matter

    Pages 245-262
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Keywords

About this book

“Acceptable Risk” – On the Rationality (and Irrationality) of Emotional Evaluations of Risk What is “acceptable risk”? That question is appropriate in a number of different contexts, political, social, ethical, and scienti c. Thus the question might be whether the voting public will support a risky proposal or project, whether people will buy or accept a risky product, whether it is morally permissible to pursue this or that potentially harmful venture, or whether it is wise or prudent to test or try out some possibly dangerous hypothesis or product. But complicating all of these queries, the “sand in the machinery” of rational decision-making, are the emotions. It is often noted (but too rarely studied) that voters are swayed by their passions at least as much as they are convinced by rational arguments. And it is obvious to advertisers and retailers that people are seduced by all sorts of appeals to their vanities, their fears, their extravagant hopes, their insecurities. At least one major thread of ethical discourse, the one following Kant, minimizes the importance of the emotions (“the inclinations”) in favor of an emphatically rational decision-making process, and it is worth mulling over the fact that many of those who do not accept Kant’s ethical views more or less applaud his rejection of the “moral sentiment theory” of the time, promoted by such luminary philosophers as David Hume and Adam Smith.

Editors and Affiliations

  • Dept. Philosophy, Delft University of Technology, Delft, Netherlands

    Sabine Roeser

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