Conservatism in Risk Assessment: A Case of Conceptual Confusion. Ralph M. Perhac, Jr., Energy, Environment and Resources Center, University of Tennessee, 327 South Stadium Hall, Knoxville, TN 37996
It is widely accepted that the debate over conservatism in risk assessment is at heart a debate over some very fundamental value judgments (e.g., is it better to be safe than sorry). In this paper, I largely reject this view of the matter. Rather, I argue that conservatism reflects conceptual confusion and possibly self-contradiction, neither of which is a value I can imagine anyone embracing. Arguments for conservatism typically suffer from a lack of explicitly stated or clearly conceived premises, which requires that I reconstruct the argument, identifying its implicit premises. First, however, I define conservatism, a non-trivial task. I then consider the argument that risk aversion makes a case for conservatism. l argue that while risk aversion maybe a necessary condition for conservatism, it is not a sufficient condition. it is necessary to introduce the premise that saving human lives is qualitatively more important than saving money. I argue that this premise, depending upon how it is interpreted, is either conceptually incoherent or inconsistent with the values even of those who embrace conservatism, which leaves conservatism without any conceptual basis. I also consider analogies which seek to make a case for conservatism in risk assessment by pointing out that conservatism is accepted (and justified) in other realms. I maintain that these analogies fail to establish that conservatism, in fact, accounts for the intuitively plausible decisions which are attributed to it.