“Safety is never allowed to trump all other con­cerns”, says Julian Bag­gini, and with­out say­ing as much gov­ern­ments must con­sis­tently put a price on lives and deter­mine how much risk to expose the pub­lic to.

In an arti­cle for the BBC, Bag­gini takes a com­pre­hen­sive look at how gov­ern­ments make risk assess­ments and in the process dis­cusses a topic of con­stant intrigue for me: how much a human life is val­ued by dif­fer­ent gov­ern­ments and their departments.

The ethics of risk is not as straight­for­ward as the rhetoric of “para­mount impor­tance” sug­gests. Peo­ple talk of the “pre­cau­tion­ary prin­ci­ple” or “erring on the side of cau­tion” but gov­ern­ments are always trad­ing safety for con­ve­nience or other gains. […]

Gov­ern­ments have to choose on our behalf which risks we should be exposed to.

That poses a dif­fi­cult eth­i­cal dilemma: should gov­ern­ment deci­sions about risk reflect the often irra­tional foibles of the pop­u­lace or the ratio­nal cal­cu­la­tions of sober risk assess­ment? Should our politi­cians opt for informed pater­nal­ism or respect for irra­tional preferences? […]

In prac­tice, gov­ern­ments do not make fully ratio­nal risk assess­ments. Their cal­cu­la­tions are based partly on cost-benefit analy­ses, and partly on what the pub­lic will tolerate.

via Schneier on Security