Emotions and Risky Technologies

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

4. Part III: Emotions as a Guide to Acceptable Risk

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 157-157

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   2. Emotion in Risk Regulation: Competing Theories

      • Dan M. Kahan

      Pages 159-175

   3. Emotions Within the Bounds of Pure Reason: Emotionality and Rationality in the Acceptance of Technological Risks

      • Dieter Birnbacher

      Pages 177-194

   4. Emotions Involved in Risk Perception: From Sociological and Psychological Risk Studies Towards a Neosentimentalist Meta-Ethics

      • Felicitas Kraemer

      Pages 195-211

   5. Risk Emotions and Risk Judgments: Passive Bodily Experience and Active Moral Reasoning in Judgmental Constellations

      • Mark Coeckelbergh

      Pages 213-230

   6. Emotional Reflection About Risks

      • Sabine Roeser

      Pages 231-244

5. Back Matter

   Pages 245-262

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“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.

• GM-foods
• cloning
• ethics
• morality
• nuclear energy
• risk regulation
• risky technologies

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

  Sabine Roeser

Policies and ethics