CFP: Ethics and Risks (Ethical Perspectives Journal)

Call for Papers: Ethics and Risks

Ethical Perspectives invites contributions to a special issue on ethics and risks.

Most of our decisions are made under conditions of risk or uncertainty about the possible consequences of our actions. This can be the result of a lack of knowledge and/or the sheer complexity of a given situation (e.g. the potential for unintended effects and unpredictable feedback processes). To add to such intricacies, there is wide diversity in the range of risks and uncertainties that confronts us: from large-scale political decisions about climate change, terrorist attacks, and new technologies to perhaps more prosaic cases related to health, accidents and financial crises.

Given the importance of the topic of risk and uncertainty, it is no wonder that ethicists’ concern with it has increased steadily over the last decades. Yet, on the whole, the following can be asserted with some confidence: normative inquiries remain largely wedded to a fictional world of certainty where outcomes are either known in advance or are (at least in principle) knowable; normative theories (both consequentialist and non-consequentialist ones) remain ill-equipped to handle the moral and ethical dimensions of risks; and, there are no clear solutions about how normative answers to questions raised by risks and uncertainty on the theoretical or ideal level could become action-guiding in a non-ideal world.

This special issue sets out to advance the debate on different normative approaches on the topic of risk and uncertainty, as well as relate these to our decision-making in everyday life and at the policy level.

Questions that could be addressed include, but are not limited to, the following:

·         What (if anything) is the harm in imposing a risk?

·         How can risk imposition be justified?

·         How should we weigh risks against each other and how should we fairly distribute them?

·         Do numbers count once we are dealing with the imposition of risks of harm?

·         How should we deal with uncertainty, for example in large-scale technologies?

·         How does the presence of risk affect our duties to future generations?

·         What role (if any) should public perceptions of risk have in policy-making?

·         Is the Precautionary Principle sound?

·         How do normative approaches differ on the ideal and non-ideal level when it  comes to risks and uncertainty?

Schedule

The deadline for submissions is December 31, 2017, and the Special Issue is supposed to be published in June 2018.

Submission

Please prepare your submission according to the guidelines that can be found on the homepage of Ethical Perspectives (www.ethical-perspectives.be).

All manuscripts must be submitted in electronic format by e-mail. They are to be prepared for anonymous review and sent as e-mail attachments (.doc, .docx, or .rtf files) to Kanita Kovacevic ([email protected]).

Guest editors:

Lukas Meyer, Harald Stelzer, Adriana Placani, Eike Düvel, and Thomas Pölzler (University of Graz, Department of Philosophy and FWF Doctoral Program Climate Change).