Education, risk and ethics

Abstract

While the notion of risk remains under-theorised in moral philosophy, risk aversion and moralist self-protection appear as dominant cultural tendencies saturating educational orientation and practice. Philosophy of education has responded to the educational emphasis on risk management by exposing the unavoidable and positive presence of risk in any endeavour to learn and teach. Taking such responses into account, I discuss how the theoretical connection of risk and education could be radicalised through an ethical approach combined with epistemological and existential concerns. My aim is to propose an ethics that is sensitive to the difference between risks taken and risks imposed and to the cultural variations of what counts as danger. Finally, I explain how the educational relevance of such an ethics requires a prior questioning of the western understanding of self and world that has functioned as a subtext of the dominant view of risk.

Keywords:

• Beck
• Justice
• Kropotkin
• Security
• Self-presevation
• Socrates

Notes

Notes

1. Welch's ethics of risk differs in certain important respects from what I am going to discuss in this essay but I cannot expand on this without becoming sidetracked. For an educational perspective on the significance of Welch's work on the ethics of risk see Gunzenhauser (2002) and Birden (2002).

2. It is true that many philosophers of education have commented on the ethical dimension of the acknowledgement of educational risk taking. But they have done so mostly in a tangential way. Hence, I wish to formulate this dimension of risk more fully and in a more differentiated sense, taking into consideration the unavoidable dependence of conceptions of risk on cultural meanings and priorities.

3. Even if, as Beck maintains, it were true that technological risks are non-intuitable thus requiring conceptual and instrumental designation through scientific knowledge, still there is ample space for risk contemplation in other respects.

4. For example, Strawson has developed a restrained and descriptivist sense of the term which includes, as Norris writes (1991, p. 49), ‘all reflection on the power and limits of human knowledge, all attempts to demarcate the “bounds of sense” ’.