ABSTRACT
All societies need to make decisions concerning risks. Some of these decisions are substantive (e.g. should we rely on nuclear power?) others are procedural (e.g. who should decide on energy policy?). Procedural decisions are secondorder: they are decisions on how to make substantive choices concerning risks. Political philosophies of risk should have something to say on both substantive and procedural issues, though the balance of the intellectual effort will usually and naturally lie on the second problem.1 Obviously, political philosophies of risk cannot be free-standing; typically they will be offshoots of more general positions in political philosophy. Liberals and communitarians, multiculturalists and anarchists are likely to propose very different procedures for the collective handling of risk – after all, their radically different overall conceptions of what is a desirable political order are bound to make themselves felt also when it comes to deciding on risks. It is striking and perhaps surprising to note that very few contemporary strands of political philosophy contain explicit prescriptions on how to deal with risk and uncertainty. The exception to this rule is the direction committed to ‘deliberative democracy’. In this chapter I shall review, and critically discuss, the two most important proposals for a political philosophy of risk within this broad school of thought.
