Abstract
Risk assessments play an important role in decisions about how to regulate environmental pollutants that contribute to climate change as well as to other human and environmental health threats. While the process of risk assessment is often considered to be a narrowly scientific endeavor (in contrast to risk management, which explicitly incorporates economic and political considerations), in practice it is extremely difficult to eliminate ethical and political judgments from risk assessments. As a result, bioethicists have important opportunities to clarify the role of value judgments in these assessments and to help make these judgments in a more transparent and justifiable manner.
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Elliott, K.C. (2016). Value Judgments in Environmental Risk Assessments. In: Macpherson, C. (eds) Bioethical Insights into Values and Policy. Public Health Ethics Analysis, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26167-6_12
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