Formal Analysis Including Value Judgments and Public Risk

摘要

Many government decisions have an impact on physical risks to the public. These decisions include setting of standards and regulations, licensing of various activities and goods, and allocation of financial resources. In all of these cases, one crucial element in the decision making process is that the expenditure of additional finances can reduce public risk (i.e., save lives and reduce injury and morbidity). The issue, which requires value judgements to solve, is to find the correct balance of expenditures and risks. Unfortunately, many of these important decisions are arrived at through informal decision processes. This paper describes an alternative formal procedure to focus explicitly on some of the value judgments necessarily used in these processes. A prototypical case of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is examined to illustrte the concepts. (ERA citation 05:024186)