Risks, including health and technological, attract a lot of attention in modern societies, from individuals as well as policy-makers. Human beings have always had to deal with dangers, but contemporary societies conceptualise these dangers as risks, indicating that they are to some extent controllable and calculable. Conceiving of dangers in this way implies a need to analyse how we hold people responsible for risks and how we can and should take responsibility for risks. Moral Responsibility and Risk in Society combines philosophical discussion of different concepts and notions of responsibility with context-specific applications in the areas of health, technology and environment. The book consists of two parts addressing two crucial aspects of risks and responsibility: holding agents responsible, i.e. ascribing and distributing responsibility for risks, and taking responsibility for risk. More specifically, the book discusses the values of fairness and efficacy in responsibility distributions and makes distinctions between backward-looking and forward-looking responsibility as well as individual and collective responsibility. Additionally, it analyses what it means to take responsibility for technological risks, conceptualising this kind of responsibility as a virtue, and furthermore, explores the notion of responsible risk communication and the implications for adult-child relationships. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental ethics, bioethics, public health ethics, engineering ethics, philosophy of risk and moral philosophy.

This path-breaking text constructs a new way of thinking about social work based on contemporary social theory. Working in a counter-tradition that is suspicious of a number of governing ideas and practices in social work, it draws on themes from Beck, Giddens, Rose to explore the impact of risk society and neo liberalism on social work.

Risk has become one of the main topics in fields as diverse as engineering, medicine and economics, and it is also studied by social scientists, psychologists and legal scholars. But the topic of risk also leads to more fundamental questions such as: What is risk? What can decision theory contribute to the analysis of risk? What does the human perception of risk mean for society? How should we judge whether a risk is morally acceptable or not? Over the last couple of decades questions like these have attracted interest from philosophers and other scholars into risk theory. This handbook provides for an overview into key topics in a major new field of research. It addresses a wide range of topics, ranging from decision theory, risk perception to ethics and social implications of risk, and it also addresses specific case studies. It aims to promote communication and information among all those who are interested in theoetical issues concerning risk and uncertainty. This handbook brings together internationally leading philosophers and scholars from other disciplines who work on risk theory. The contributions are accessibly written and highly relevant to issues that are studied by risk scholars. We hope that the Handbook of Risk Theory will be a helpful starting point for all risk scholars who are interested in broadening and deepening their current perspectives.

This volume bridges contemporary philosophical conceptions of risk and responsibility and offers an extensive examination of the topic. It shows that risk and responsibility combine in ways that give rise to new philosophical questions and problems. Philosophical interest in the relationship between risk and responsibility continues to rise, due in no small part to environmental crises, emerging technologies, legal developments, and new medical advances. Despite such interest, scholars are still working out how to conceive of the links between risk and responsibility, the implications that risks may have to conceptions of responsibility (and vice versa), as well as how such theorizing might play out in applied cases. With contributions from leading scholars, this volume brings together new work examining the interplay between risk and responsibility, exploring its varied philosophical aspects and applications to contemporary issues in law, bioethics, technology, and environmental ethics. Risk and Responsibility in Context will be of interest to philosophers working in ethics, bioethics, philosophy of law, and philosophy of technology, as well as scholars and practitioners in law, health and science management, public policy, and environmental studies. The Open Access version of this book is available at www.taylorfrancis.com. This publication is licensed, unless otherwise indicated, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate any modifications. Use for commercial purposes is not permitted.

`As the study of social policy comes increasingly to address issues of theorising welfare in a period of fundamental social change, Culpitt′s book is especially welcome in helping to update the reader in many of the debates and explorations surrounding social change, in particular those instigated by Foucault some two decades ago - his work on "governmentality" is central to Culpitt′s book - and by Beck on risk more recently. The book also serves as a useful introduction to other key thinkers influencing social theory today whose work also addresses issues central to social policy, such as Giddens, Honneth and Turner′ - Martin Hewitt, University of Hertfordshire This book examines the notion of risk in relation to social policy. It takes ideas about risk (as expressed by sociologists such as Ulrich Beck in Risk Society), and applies them to recent changes in welfare. The author shows neo-liberals have used various aspects of risk to attack welfare dependency, and how various rhetoric′s of risk have been used to reshape contemporary politics. Social Policy and Risk makes a major contribution to our understanding of contemporary welfare politics.

Risk has become one of the main topics in fields as diverse as engineering, medicine and economics, and it is also studied by social scientists, psychologists and legal scholars. But the topic of risk also leads to more fundamental questions such as: What is risk? What can decision theory contribute to the analysis of risk? What does the human perception of risk mean for society? How should we judge whether a risk is morally acceptable or not? Over the last couple of decades questions like these have attracted interest from philosophers and other scholars into risk theory. This handbook provides for an overview into key topics in a major new field of research. It addresses a wide range of topics, ranging from decision theory, risk perception to ethics and social implications of risk, and it also addresses specific case studies. It aims to promote communication and information among all those who are interested in theoetical issues concerning risk and uncertainty. This handbook brings together internationally leading philosophers and scholars from other disciplines who work on risk theory. The contributions are accessibly written and highly relevant to issues that are studied by risk scholars. We hope that the Handbook of Risk Theory will be a helpful starting point for all risk scholars who are interested in broadening and deepening their current perspectives.

To what extent are we responsible for our actions? Philosophical theorizing about this question has recently taken a social turn, marking a shift in focus from traditional metaphysical concerns about free will and determinism. Recent theories have attended to the interpersonal dynamics at the heart of moral responsibility practices and the role of the moral environment in scaffolding agency. Yet, the implications of social inequality and the role of social power for our moral responsibility practices remains a surprisingly neglected topic. The conception of agency involved in current approaches to moral responsibility is overly idealized, assuming that our practices involve interactions between equally empowered and situated agents. In twelve new essays and a substantial introduction, this volume systematically challenges this assumption, exploring the impact of social factors such as power relationships and hierarchies, paternalism, socially constructed identities, race, gender and class on moral responsibility. Social factors have bearing on the circumstances in which agents act as well as on the person or people in the position to hold that agent accountable for his or her action. Additionally, social factors bear on the parties who pass judgment on the agent. Leading theorists of moral responsibility, including Michael McKenna, Marina Oshana, and Manuel Vargas, consider the implications of oppression and structural inequality for their respective theories. Neil Levy urges the need to refocus our analyses of the epistemic and control conditions for moral responsibility from individual to socially extended agents. Leading theorists of relational autonomy, including Catriona Mackenzie, Natalie Stoljar and Andrea Westlund develop new insights into the topic of moral responsibility. Other contributors bring debates about moral responsibility into dialogue with recent work in feminist philosophy, social epistemology and social psychology on topics such as epistemic injustice and implicit bias. Collectively, the essays in this volume reorient philosophical debates about moral responsibility in important new directions.

Edmund Burke: Modernity, Politics, and Aesthetics examines the philosophy of Burke in view of its contribution to our understanding of modernity. Stephen K. White argues that Burke shows us how modernity engenders an implicit forgetfulness of human finitude. White illustrates this theme by showing how Burke's political thought, his judgment of the modern system of morality and policy, and its taste for a false sublime are structured by his aesthetics.

`The book is a unique combination of criminology, politics and philosophy which can be recommended′ - Network, Newsletter of the British Sociological Association `Hudson′s Justice in the Risk Society is stunning in the depth and breadth of its scholarship. In examining the challenges the risk society presents for established conceptions of justice she compels a profound rethinking of what justice does, and can, mean. Her analysis will frame and inspire future debate′ - Clifford Shearing, Professor, Law Program, Research School of Social Science, Australian National University `Remarkably comprehensive, ambitious in its scope and morally compelling. Barbara Hudson draws skilfully from a wide range of frameworks... She asks fundamental questions about the nature of justice and argues for a radical rethink of liberalism. She explores complex subject matter in a clear and accessible fashion. This excellent book will surely reinvigorate theoretical thinking on the nature of punishment for years to come′ - Kieran McEvoy, Professor of Law and Transitional Justice, School of Law, Queen′s University Belfast ′The book makes an important contribution to the development of new perspectives on justice and provides a rigorous analysis of political and ethical theories that will be highly relevant to criminology and penology students, academics, criminal justice practitioners and policy makers′ - SOCLAG Legal Journal How much of a threat does society′s preoccupation with `risk′ pose to the ideal of `justice′? Innovations in control and in penal policy are increasingly dominated by the theme of public protection, motivated by the aim of controlling risk rather than the aim of enhancing social justice. In Justice in the Risk Society, Barbara Hudson outlines traditional liberal perspectives on justice, risk and security, as well as addressing some key concerns, including: · the challenges to justice: the politics of risk and safety · communitarian and feminist political and ethical theories · how to use current theories and perspectives such as Habermas′s discourse ethics and postmodern perspectives on justice · how to develop new methods of re-affirming and reconstructing theories and institutions of justice The book concludes with analysis of two of the most important elements of justice for late-modernity: discursiveness and human rights. Justice in the Risk Society provides theoretical analysis with a discussion of policies, and arguments are illustrated by cases and examples. The book reviews political and ethical theories in a way that is highly relevant and accessible to criminology and penology students, practitioners and academics, as well as making an original contribution to the development of new perspectives on justice.

When many people are involved in an activity, it is often difficult, if not impossible, to pinpoint who is morally responsible for what, a phenomenon known as the ‘problem of many hands.’ This term is increasingly used to describe problems with attributing individual responsibility in collective settings in such diverse areas as public administration, corporate management, law and regulation, technological development and innovation, healthcare, and finance. This volume provides an in-depth philosophical analysis of this problem, examining the notion of moral responsibility and distinguishing between different normative meanings of responsibility, both backward-looking (accountability, blameworthiness, and liability) and forward-looking (obligation, virtue). Drawing on the relevant philosophical literature, the authors develop a coherent conceptualization of the problem of many hands, taking into account the relationship, and possible tension, between individual and collective responsibility. This systematic inquiry into the problem of many hands pertains to discussions about moral responsibility in a variety of applied settings.