I have previously (and repeatedly) cited a paper by philosophers Allison Ross and Nafsika Athanassoulis that highlights the risk-taking nature of engineering practice and draws out some of the associated ethical implications. In two additional papers (“A Virtue Ethical Account of Making Decisions About Risk,” Journal of Risk Research, Vol. 13, No. 2, March 2010, pp. 217-230; “Risk and Virtue Ethics,” chapter 33 in Handbook of Risk Theory, Springer, 2012), the same authors discuss risk in a more general sense and argue convincingly that virtue ethics provides the most adequate approach for dealing with it. …
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