‘Making Singular Risk Decisions’ Dr Matt Burch (School of Philosophy and Art History, University of Essex) Friday 25th October, 16.00-18.00 - Room S2, Alison Richard Building
The QUALITY project <http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/programmes/qualitative-and-quantitative-social-science-unifying-the-logic-of-causal-in> at CRASSH warmly welcomes Dr Matt Burch to give a presentation on his ongoing work on theories of risk. All are welcome - attendance is free but places are limited, so please email sjp...@cam.ac.uk to register. Abstract: Today’s dominant approaches to risk maintain that, whenever possible, responsible risk decisions must be based on statistical evidence and guided by the norms of some version of probability theory (Oberdiek 2017). Behind this insistence lies: Substantial empirical evidence that statistical risk prediction is superior to unaided clinical judgment (Meehl, 1954; Dawes et al. 1989) A widely popular theory that our intuitive appraisals of risk are biased by our default mental heuristics (Kahneman, Slovich, & Tversky, 1982) and implicit attitudes (Greenwald & Banaji 1995) Research suggesting that intuitive expert judgment doesn’t exist outside a narrow range of predictable environments (Kahneman & Klein 2009) In this presentation, I will argue that probabilistic approaches to risk, though powerful in many respects, provide insufficient guidance for an important subclass of risk decisions that pervade everyday life and contemporary ‘risk work’ (Brown & Gale 2018a, 2018b), namely, singular risk decisions—one-off decisions that individuals make in the face of uncertainty with the aim of managing potential setbacks to their interests (or the interests of the person on whose behalf the decision is made). I will consider several criticisms of probabilistic approaches that highlight their limitations vis-à-vis singular risk decisions; and I will argue that taken together these criticisms suggest that we cannot make defensible singular risk decisions without appealing to moral considerations that fall outside the domain of probability theory. I will then sketch an alternative person-centred, humanistic approach to such decisions that acknowledges the strengths of probabilistic approaches while attempting to overcome some of their limitations. *** Rosie Worsdale Postdoctoral Research Associate Qualitative and Quantitative Social Science: Unifying the Logic of Causal Inference? CRASSH, University of Cambridge --- College Research Associate Kings’ College Cambridge _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
