ABSTRACT
Risk communication can have enormous impact on people's behavior. This chapter argues that risk communication should not only be effective, but it should also be ethically justified, and that emotions play an important role in achieving these goals. We discuss several ways in which emotions are crucial in risk communication. First, risk messages and their emotional impact on recipients should be analyzed from an ethical perspective. Furthermore, moral emotions, such as care and empathy, should be used to design an ethically justified message. We illustrate this point by discussing several examples from public health risk communication, with a specific focus on the current recommendations and communication about infant feeding in Western countries. In addition, moral emotions can help to deepen people's moral awareness of risks, and to motivate people to act accordingly. We illustrate this by discussing the example of climate change risk communication. Our argument is based on a novel theory of risk emotions that challenges the dominant paradigm, according to which emotions are opposed to rationality. The alternative framework sees risk emotions as a source of moral knowledge and practical rationality. We start our analysis by first sketching this alternative framework of risk emotions.
