WP1. The Nature of Risk

Given that the whole project hinges on the concept of risk, some preliminary work will be required in order to elucidate its content. We do not intend our theoretical approach to be purely stipulative and, for that reason, we will pay due attention to how risk assessments take place in ordinary life. In such contexts, the concept refers to situations in which some undesirable event may occur, but only in cases where it is not certain that it will occur. Prima facie, that implies two conditions: first, the event in question must be significant in some respect, with negative valence (i.e., there is no risk of good things happening), and second, the occurrence of the event must not be settled (i.e., we do not talk about risks when referring to things that have already occurred, or certainly will). Any account that attempts to make use of the concept for more technical purposes must in one way or the other fit such intuitive requirements.

Although its explicit use in epistemology is rather recent, the concept of risk is far from new, neither in philosophy, nor in the specialized sciences. Elaborate conceptions thereof are usually cashed out in terms of probabilities, either subjective or objective. The former possibility gives rise to the prolific field of risk perception (Sjöberg 2000), which investigates the subjective attitudes that agents manifest regarding the risk in some situation (see Roeser et al. eds. 2012. 603-790 for an overview). By contrast, considerations of risk in terms of objective probabilities focus on the proper existence of risks as a phenomenon that is independent of anybody’s awareness of it, which is usually expressed in terms of a frequentist interpretation of probability (a hegemonic view made very clear by Hansson 2018). Furthermore, a crucial distinction in decision-theory, extensively used in fields such as business administration and medicine, is the distinction between risk and uncertainty (Wu et al. 2004). We make decisions ‘under risk’ when there are known probabilities of occurrence of some undesirable event, whereas decisions under uncertainty take place when statistics about negative outcomes are not available, or only partially available (see Hansson 2018 for further discussion of the concept of risk in the context of decision-theory).

We believe that a more accurate understanding of the concept of risk will arise from a proper grasp of its relationship with the concept of luck, which has been widely used in epistemology, but not only, even if its very nature seems elusive (see Lackey 2008). In contrast to the philosophical theory of risk, which, as we have just seen, has been dominated by probabilistic approaches, the concept of luck has been mostly discussed by epistemologists and moral theorists in terms of modality or lack of control—see Broncano-Berrocal (2016) for an overview of theories of luck. We take as a working hypothesis the idea that a confrontation between these alternative theoretical frameworks will shed some light on both concepts, luck and risk, whose relation is yet far from being clear. In fact, the two principal investigators of this project are already active contributors to this debate and count with some significant publications in this emerging literature. WP1 will thus aim at further developing their views—Broncano- Berrocal (2015; forthcoming-b) and Navarro (2019)—and therefore, at solidifying their respective positions in the literature.