ABSTRACT
The perceptions and feelings of the public about environmental risks include those of being unfair, uncontrollable, untrustworthy, and involving the reality of fear, anger, and suffering. Concerning the risk assessment paradigm in particular, one can observe that in classical risk assessment there is no opportunity for admitting the subjectivity of the risk assessor. A number of issues emerge in the discussion and analysis of values and value judgments. In the area of environmental risk decision making these include, among others, health and safety, pollution prevention, uncertainties, fallibility, biases, models such as the one that separates risk assessment and risk management, public participation and concerns, and intergenerational equity. Ethical issues are often masked or hidden by current risk assessment practices — for example: the burden of proof, distributive justice; and race, color, creed, social status, communicative rationality of the general public.
