Here is a philosophical problem I am working on, it also draws on some aspects of tort law, your comments are always welcome:
“There is an arbitrariness in defining the relevant class of risky events. In my lifetime as a driver, I stand some (fairly low) chance of killing an innocent pedestrian. Few people would argue that I should be prohibited from driving. Assume, however, that science prolongs (fit) human life forever, at least unless you are struck down by a car. My chance of killing an innocent pedestrian then would approach certainty, given that I plan to continue driving throughout an eternal life. In fact I could be expected to kill very many pedestrians. Should I then be prohibited from driving? When we make a prohibition decision, should we measure the risk of a single act of driving, or the risk of driving throughout a lifetime? Measuring the bundled risk appears to imply absurd consequences, such as banning driving for people with sufficiently long lives.
Alternatively, measuring the risk of only the single act is vulnerable to counterexamples. Imagine an involuntary game of Russian roulette with very many chambers in the gun, played very many times against me. The chance of my death from any single firing is very small, but surely we would prohibit such a game, looking at the high overall risk of the bundle. In this case we consider the bundled risk, but does this mean that we should stop immortals from driving cars?”
Addendum: I am posing this question in a framework where individual rights have some meaning. So if a given activity (however defined) crosses some threshold level of risk, vis-a-vis its victims, we will consider prohibiting it, even if the associated benefits with the activity are high. We remain with the question of how to circumscribe the activity and thus arrive at a unique measure of risk. Of course some people will view this dilemma as an argument against the idea of rights, and in favor of utilitarianism. Also, please note that this is a fabricated scenario, as philosophers are wont to do. It doesn’t matter whether in reality the car will someday be superseded, accidents will cease to be deadly, that the driver is perhaps also a pedestrian, or whatever. It is a deliberately stripped down example to force us to confront how we think about compounded risks.
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