Background

Risk is part of our lives. It is part of the decisions we take (whose outcomes we are rarely fully certain about) and of the actions we perform (whose consequences often go against our personal interests). Like many other familiar phenomena, risk is worth of philosophical investigation in itself simply because of this widespread significance in our everyday life—as we will see later, there are several competing philosophical views of its nature. However, the concept of risk also has significance for philosophy, in the sense that it is a key concept in some central areas of philosophy. For example, risk and, in particular, how to rationally make decisions in conditions of uncertainty is at the core of decision-theory (see Wu et al. 2004 for an overview). In ethics_, some famous disputes such as those on moral luck (Nagel 1979; Nelkin 2013 for an overview) or the ethics of belief (see §3; Chignell 2018) are in fact dealing with the possibility of risk and failure. Furthermore, many moral theories lose traction when it comes to pinning down the conditions under which it is morally acceptable to expose others to risk (Zimmerman 2005; Hansson 2013). In action theory, the lively discussion aroused by the so-called ‘Knobe effect’ (or the ‘side-effect effect’)—which is a psychological phenomenon by which people’s intuitions about intentional actions vary depending on the goodness or badness of their side effects—can be best formulated in terms of risk: what influences people’s intuitions is the perceived risk associated to such side effects (see Knobe 2003; Feltz 2007 for an overview).

Risk—and more specifically risk assessment—also plays a pivotal role in the intersection between ethics and philosophy of science, and particularly in discussions revolving around the precautionary principle, i.e., the principle that in its strongest form mandates taking no action (especially concerning environmental issues) unless one is certain that it will do no harm (see e.g., Morris 2000; Munthe 2011; Ahteensuu & Sandin 2012). A related problem that is relevant in philosophy of science is that of explaining how scientific knowledge informs (and should inform) risk assessments in general and whether or not scientific knowledge, in playing such a role, might promote non-epistemic values (Shrader-Frechette 1991; Hansson 2007).

In epistemology, the notion of risk is relevant in at least five ongoing debates: (1) virtue epistemology and performance normativity; (2) the analysis of knowledge and the role of epistemic luck; (3) knowledge closure and the safety principle; (4) the epistemology of testimony, and (5) the debate on the ethics of belief regarding the twin epistemic goals of attaining truth and avoiding error.