Safety is a public good because the “consumption” or enjoyment of safety by one individual does not diminish the “availability” of safety for other individuals (assuming that the value of each human life is equal to the value of any other human life). Government is elected by citizens of the society and is given official authority to enforce rules and regulations. Thus the government is given official power through enforcement of laws and regulations to maintain safety for the benefit of all citizens within its jurisdiction. Magnitude of an accident (and its consequences) may affect each and every individual in the society or a random group of individuals. Theoretically, it is in general interest of all citizens to oblige with the rules and maintain safety. In reality, “the picture” has many conflicting nuances.
As individuals we react to immediate pain. Pain simplifies our point of view and helps us to survive (Minsky, 1985). Pain is build-in alarm system that informs human brain about immediate threats to its body’s existence. As humans we tend to react to most immediate threats. When threats (and/or health hazards) are remote in terms of time and impact – such as smoking, breathing poisonous air, eating trans-fat food, etc – our reaction is not as swift or as rational.
A societal equivalent of human pain is loss of human life. As a community or a society, people tend to react to accidents that involve loss of human lives with great attention. The risks that are not visible or well understood do not get public attention until fatal accident actually takes place. As individuals, human society in general does not have high attention to threats and problems that are far in time and space.
Nothing can be valued more than human life. However, there is a distinction between the value of an exiting human life and the value of a deceased human being. The later case was a substitute for blood feud or what is called vendetta, where attaching price to diseased life was the way to avoid further bloodshed. In fact this approach has been considered as more civilized conflict resolution for centuries (what is know as
blood money). The moral line is drawn between the world of alive and the world of deceased. Those who attempt to take “the price tag” from the
world of deceased and use it in our world make rational analysis, which is immoral at the same time.
In my point of view, there are two important trends worth noticing:
(1) As human society become more dependent on complex systems, there seems to be slow convergence of system safety and public health. It is clear that the fundamental of two fields is the same – the value of human life. However, it is not clear whether such oversimplified approach can be beneficial to either system safety or public health. This is just an intuitive feeling which I hope to understand during the course.
(2) Availability of information and its widespread and fast dissemination leads to greater public awareness. Easily available instruments and tools (email, matlab, google earth, skype, youtube, simple chemical tests and pH strips, individual radioactivity sensors, etc) lead to increased role of individuals in dealing with safety, which in turn influence behavior of governments and corporations. Availability of information also builds much richer postmortem picture of an accident and different accident scenarios, where ordinary citizens are able to question and challenge official reports and causes of an accident.
The simplest answer to the question “who should be responsibility for risk management?” is government and its regulatory agencies. However, we know that the government agencies are managed and run by individuals. These individuals, as many of us, can manage only a certain level of complexity. There is no guarantee that they can integrate all the pieces together and maintain public safety all the time.
I think (“which implies that I do not as yet know so”), since safety is a public good, it has to be collective responsibility of each and every citizen in the society to think in cohesive and responsible when it comes to safety.
The role of the legal system depends on the end–result that society expects from its courts. There must be a reason why the US legal system adopted the civil (tort) approach towards safety hazards (besides obvious corporate interests). It is my understanding that such approach was in part chosen to shift attention from responsibility of individuals to corporate responsibility, and eventually to accidents/hazards causes. It is difficult to judge if the system is functioning effectively or not since we have no information how many accidents/hazards were prevented just by potential possibility and danger of civil litigation. We can only see the cases that are floating on the surface, in which corporations are using complex legal procedures to avoid, mitigate or postpone expensive settlements.
Criminal charges, on the other hand shift the focus from the accident to particular individual responsibility. It is often the case where both the government (which could be under public pressure) and the public itself are eager to “teach a lesson”. The expectation is shifted from understanding wholesale list of accident’s causes to finding specific “target” or “villain”. Other potential “targets” are giving limited information about the accident reinforcing the initial bias, redirecting the blame and sacrificing the least protected “target.”
In the case of tainted milk, the Chinese government decided to teach a lesson. Three individuals were sentenced to death and 21 others, “mostly dairy producers and middlemen, were given terms ranging from two years to life in prison” (
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/22/world/asia/22iht-milk.3.19601372.html). Such lesson is likely to influence behavior of Chinese businessmen and even prevent potential food poisoning. One can argue that the trial may bring limited benefits to the society, even if it does not address the structural problem of food safety.
Here I would like to address the issue of Human error and Learning from Mistakes described (Flatch et al.). I think that we need to decouple <understanding the accident> from <learning from the accident>. I argue that it could be possible to learn from an accident even if complete description of an accident is not determined and vice versa. In any of the four options, the end result of the accident is the same.
|
Learning form an accident |
Failing to learn from an accident |
Understanding the accident |
X |
X |
Failing to understand the accident |
X |
X |
So in the case of tainted milk, even if full picture of the food safety hazard has not been found or at least publicly recognized (i.e. export of the poisoned food products), there is still a possibility that appropriate lessons are learned. In the case of uncontrolled acceleration (Audi, Toyota, GM), even if the cause(s) of the fault(s) was known, the management has not learned the lesson.
This takes us back to individual reaction to physical pain. Perhaps criminal prosecution of individual executives (in this case imprisonment) could be more effective approach in achieving public safety at the cost of objective accident investigation.
The biggest doubt here is that by focusing on individual responsibility we do not solve the challenges of potential accidents, which could be greater in power and magnitude as our society becomes more complex and interdependent.
