On Risk and Responsibility

By Maria Odete Madeira


Responsibility, from the Latin, respondere, is a name for a systemic capability that any autonomous human agent has of being able to account for his/her actions and respective effects, accepting the consequences of these actions (to be accountable).

Because of this capability, the human agents have the right and the duty to account (respondere) for their actions.


“(…) Today the guiding hand of natural selection is unmistakably human with potentially Earth-shaking consequences.

The fossil record and contemporary field studies suggest that the average rate of extinction over the past hundred million years has hovered at several species per year. Today the extinction rate surpasses 3,000 species per year and is accelerating rapidly; it may soon reach the tens of thousands. In contrast, new species are appearing at a rate of less than one per year (…) The broad path for biological evolution is now set for the next several million years. And in this sense the extinction crisis – the race to save the composition, structure, and organization of biodiversity as it exists today – is over, and we have lost.”

Stephen M. Meyer, 2006, The end of the wild, pp.3-5.


The question about the responsibility of the human agents is now stretched to the limit point from which we must ask: what fundamental value do we assign to the planet?

In a risk assessment, where the agents involved have an interest in a support to a certain action, there is the inevitable contamination of that assessment with an undervaluation of the scenarios considered to be unfavorable to the intended course of action. This includes, not only, biases in the assumptions and in the processes of risk quantification, but, also, biases in the interpretations of the results.

Many of the technologies that we are now beginning to produce may open up the risk of situations with catastrophic consequences to the planet.

Some of the risk scenarios associated with these situations are known, and worked upon by the sciences involved and by risk science.

It is necessary, within a scientific approach to risk, to consider risk as a fundamental ontological operator linked to the mechanism of life and death. Generally, the risk assessment is made from the perspective of superstructures that transcend the ontological planes of immanence.

Any systemic cognitive synthesis includes an evaluation of risk and it may be more, or less, accurate in accordance with the functioning of the systemic homeostatic mechanisms.

The question that is placed about the human assessment of risk is that the type of evaluation of risk is being done in planes that ontologically transcend the systems and problems themselves, call these planes of transcendence, for instance.

In these planes of transcendence, we have what we call the political, economic, military and scientific games, that introduce an ontologic systemic bias in what regards the life and death of the systems. The evaluations of the risks are not being done about what may constitute a threat or an opportunity to the systems, what are being done are evaluations of the discourses and strategies of power, compromised with the economy, politics, military and science.

The risk has become, in today's economies, a product aimed at the satisfaction of pleasure, which raises a question: what are the phenotypic effects synthesized and metabolized by a neurocognition of the risk? To what point are the homeostatic mechanisms, that include, for instance, background feelings, being organismically blocked?

What are the risk assessments that the human agents, as consumers of risk products, may produce? In what way are they being affected by the effects of a risk culture and a risk economy?

Furthermore, the economy itself is feeding upon the risk for its own development. Besides a risk consumption culture and economy, there are the technological and scientific risks, as well as the power dynamics of wars and of natural disaster aftermaths.

No less important is to consider the role, in the perception of risk, of the religions as power institutions supported by dogmatically organized discourses of faith, built from conventioned truths and that are supported by active ideological mechanisms of convincing and vanquishing. To what point is it not the case that religions constitute a mechanism of alienation, effective and with structural effects, that blocks the cognitive processes linked to the risk perception?