Imposing Risk A Normative Framework

When we impose risk upon others, what is it that we are doing? What is risking's moral significance? What moral standards govern the imposition of risk? And how should the law respond to it? Drawing on philosophy and legal theory the author constructs a normative framework of risk imposition to help answer these important and oft-ignored questions.

We subject others and are ourselves subjected to risk all the time - risk permeates life. Despite the ubiquity of risk and its imposition, philosophers and legal scholars have devoted little of their attention to the difficult questions stimulated by the pervasiveness of risk. When we impose risk upon others, what is it that we are doing? What is risking's moral significance? What moral standards govern the imposition of risk? And how should the law respond to it? This book highlights these important but neglected questions and offers novel answers to them in a systematic way, constructing a normative framework of risk imposition that draws upon a wide range of insights from diverse sources within philosophy and legal theory. Oxford Legal Philosophy publishes the best new work in philosophically-oriented legal theory. It commissions and solicits monographs in all branches of the subject, including works on philosophical issues in all areas of public and private law, and in the national, transnational, and international realms; studies of the nature of law, legal institutions, and legal reasoning; treatments of problems in political morality as they bear on law; and explorations in the nature and development of legal philosophy itself. The series represents diverse traditions of thought but always with an emphasis on rigour and originality. It sets the standard in contemporary jurisprudence.

1 - Imposing Risk: Challenging the Very Idea
2 - Moralizing Risk
3 - The Moral Significance of Risking
4 - A Right Against Risking
5 - Justifiable Risking

John Oberdiek is Professor of Law at Rutgers Law School. He is also Associate Graduate Faculty in the Rutgers-New Brunswick Department of Philosophy and Co-Director of the Rutgers Institute for Law and Philosophy. Educated in philosophy and law at Middlebury, Oxford, New York University, and the University of Pennsylvania, Oberdiek has been a Laurance S. Rockefeller Visiting Fellow in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton.