Imposing Risk A Normative Framework

by Oberdiek, John

• ISBN13: 9780199594054
• ISBN10: 0199594058
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2017-11-07
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

We subject others and are ourselves subjected to risk all the time - risk permeates life. Despite the ubiquity of risk and its imposition, philosophers and legal scholars have devoted little of their attention to the difficult questions stimulated by the pervasiveness of risk. When we impose risk upon others, what is it that we are doing? What is risking's moral significance? What moral standards govern the imposition of risk? And how should the law respond to it? This book highlights these important but neglected questions and offers novel answers to them in a systematic way, constructing a normative framework of risk imposition that draws upon a wide range of insights from diverse sources within philosophy and legal theory.

Oxford Legal Philosophy publishes the best new work in philosophically-oriented legal theory. It commissions and solicits monographs in all branches of the subject, including works on philosophical issues in all areas of public and private law, and in the national, transnational, and international realms; studies of the nature of law, legal institutions, and legal reasoning; treatments of problems in political morality as they bear on law; and explorations in the nature and development of legal philosophy itself. The series represents diverse traditions of thought but always with an emphasis on rigour and originality. It sets the standard in contemporary jurisprudence.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Imposing Risk: Challenging the Very Idea
I. Introduction
II. The Practical and Normative Dimensions of Risk
III. Subjective Accounts of Risk: Insufficiently Normative
IV. Objective Accounts of Risk: Insufficiently Practical
V. Towards a Moralized Hybrid
2. Moralizing Risk
I. Subjectivity and Objectivity in the Concept of Risk
II. The Problem of Perspective-Indifference and the Value of Mutual Accountability
III. Overcoming Perspective-Indifference
IV. Defending an Evidence-Relative Reasonable Person Concept of Risk
V. Overcoming the Indeterminacy of Risk
3. The Moral Significance of Risking
I. Introduction
II. The Puzzle
III. Competing Accounts of the Relationship Between Harm and Risk
IV. Autonomy, Options, and Non-Material Harm
V. Taking Another's Life in Your Hands: Finessing the Action and Effect of Risking
4. A Right Against Risking
I. Introduction
II. The Basis of the Right
III. Autonomy as a Core Interest
IV. The Determinacy of the Right: Does it Prohibit Anything?
V. The Scope of the Right: Does it Prohibit Everything?
VI. Arguing Towards the Right Against Risking
VII. Violating the Right Against Risking
5. Justifiable Risking
I. Introduction
II. Deadly Risks and the False Inevitability of Interpersonal Aggregation
III. Intrapersonal Aggregation
IV. Justification to a Subject and Contractualism
V. Problems and Perspectives in the Contractualist Justification of Risk: When and to Whom?
VI. Risk and a Life Worth Living