Abstract
The paper addresses two important issues in assessing policies of responding to the risk of and the damages caused by earthquakes. First, the complex uncertainties concerning the occurrence and impacts of earthquakes raise difficult issues from the perspective of a philosophical theory of justice when assessing policies to reduce the impact of possible earthquakes. We propose a particular understanding of what justice requires, namely risk-averse weak sufficientarianism, and show how this understanding can justify the reduction of the imposition of risks of harms. Second, we address how one should respond to unavoided and unavoidable damages caused by earthquakes. Here we suggest that we should view such damages primarily as a reason for redistribution, and therefore as a matter of distributive justice.
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Notes
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That the claim is only prima facie means that it may not hold under all conditions as it could be overruled or defeated by a more pressing claim or the need to impose certain risks as a precondition for engaging in highly valuable activities.
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Meyer, L.H., Stelzer, H. (2018). Assessing Policies of Responding to the Risk and Impacts of Earthquakes from a Justice Perspective. In: Kruhl, J., Adhikari, R., Dorka, U. (eds) Living Under the Threat of Earthquakes. Springer Natural Hazards. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68044-6_19
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68044-6_19
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