Speaker Series: Luc Bovens (LSE)

“Making Risky Decisions for Others”

Luc Bovens

There is much disagreement about choices involving risk to others, such as choices involving rescue missions, treatment versus prevention, selective medical treatment, C-sections, cancer screening, alcohol policies, effective charities, and support for Diesel engines. These widely disparate choices can all be represented as choices over risky prospects. Prospects can be ranked relative to the average of the expected utilities of the people affected (or equivalently, the expectation of the average utilities in the states that may come about.) However, this ranking is insensitive to various types of distributional concerns. I construct a model that represents these distributional concerns and analyze the disagreements within the model. My model also brings clarity to disputes on how one should give priority to the worse off when risk is involved.

Luc Bovens is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics and Political Science. During the Fall of 2016 he was a  research fellow in the Hope and Optimism Project in Cornell University. He works on various topics of moral psychology (e.g., believing at will, preference change, moral luck, weakness of the will, hope, death, apologies and forgiveness, and autonomy), on issues in public policy addressed using behavioral science, and a number of topics in bioethics. He is developing a web site for teaching ethics in high school through short stories in world literature.