The Blind Spot in Risk Ethics: Managing Natural Hazards

Many risk scholars recognize the importance of including ethical considerations in risk management. Risk ethics can provide in-depth ethical analysis so that ethical considerations can be part of risk-related decisions, rather than an afterthought to those decisions. In this article, I present a brief sketch of the field of risk ethics. I argue that risk ethics has a bias toward technological hazards, thereby overlooking the risks that stem from natural and semi-natural hazards. In order to make a contribution to the field of risk research, risks ethics should broaden its scope to include natural and semi-natural hazards and develop normative distribution criteria that can support decision making on such hazards.