Understanding the Ethics of Risk as Used in Epidemiology

Abstract

This chapter analyzes the concept of risk that is central to epidemiology, since the study of disease or health of populations necessarily requires assessing and determining the probability of the factors that may increase or decrease the likelihood of disease or health. It argues that the purportedly non-normative understanding of risk in epidemiology fails to capture separate but interrelated points, such as the description of risk assessments. It also discusses the importance of risk to a population for disease p to understand the political or economic values that help create the context that led to the increased risk. The chapter delves into the ethical significance for epidemiologists to help analyze and explain who imposed risk onto whom and in what ways this risk imposition occurred. It cites a normative sense of risk in epidemiology, which appeals to most theories of justice and makes sense of the ethics of causation in either more modest or stronger terms.