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THE UNCERTAINTY FACTOR

Discussion of risk [or cost)/benefit analysis, and its offspring, socially acceptable risk, has become widespread in the past decade along with the proposal and promulgation of rules to implement environmental and health legislation. Through the courts and administrative procedures and in legislative reconsideration, this mode of analysis is offered to change or modify decisions already made or implied. Those who lost the struggle for the Congressional conscience in the beginning of the decade now offer such analysis as a last ditch effort, labeling it “scientific” (ergo good). They directly or indirectly state that the earlier legislative judgments either were not a decision-making process at all or were not “scientific” (ergo bad). The proponents are not all from those enterprises and interests who appear to bear the heaviest burden of Congressional decisions. Certainly many of the proponents come from industrial management, but they also are found in academia and government and sometimes even in the environmental, public health and labor movements. The response has been heated: hearings, debate before the Supreme Court, articles in the lay press, and exchange in our journals have all conducted the heat. The flames have been fueled by millions of dollars in government grants and contracts made in the hope that we as scholars could find some simple formula to make difficult decisions easy, cause unpopular consequences to be politically palatable, and transmute the base metal of past neglect into something somehow noble. The dialectic has been fruitful because it focuses on an effort that, like alchemy, is the first stage of true science, reminding us of Bertrand Russell’s observation’ that “most sciences, at their inception, have been connected with some form of false belief, which gave them a fictitious value.” My arguments placing risk/benefit analysis in the same class of endeavor as alchemy [and astrology) need not be detailed here, having been the subject of prior before the Academy. In summary, I pointed to the insoluble problems of equitable distribution and aggregation of risks and benefits, incommensurable values, pseudo-quantification or inappropriate precision, the equation of self-interest (to the exclusion of altruism) with rationality, the excision from consideration of the life process (present and future) or any other source of moral