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As flights resume, how dangerous is it to fly through a volcanic ash cloud? Driving could actually be a lot more dangerous, says Julian Baggini."The safety of air passengers is of paramount importance." So spoke Gordon Brown this week, defending the flight restrictions that have been put in place due to the volcanic ash cloud.
And could he really have said anything else? Has any leader every claimed that the safety of the people is his second priority?
However, the ethics of risk is not as straightforward as the rhetoric of "paramount importance" suggests. People talk of the "precautionary principle" or "erring on the side of caution" but governments are always trading safety for convenience or other gains.
For instance, 30mph speed limits on motorways would increase road safety, but almost no-one is advocating them. Lord Adonis, the transport minister, would sound callous if he said slowing cars down is too high a price to pay to save a few hundred lives per year, but that is precisely the rationale for the policy.
In this respect, governments are only behaving as we all do.
We take risks all the time, and safety is never allowed to trump all other concerns. The under 30s could eliminate one of their single biggest risks of death at a stroke if they never got into a car, but virtually all consider the inconvenience too high a price to pay.
The problem is that people are generally terrible at making rational decisions about risk.
To take just one of many examples, many Americans avoided planes after 9/11 and travelled by road instead. As a result, a team of researchers from Cornell University estimated there were at least 1,200 more deaths on America's roads than there would have been.
Foibles
Some 1,200 people died because they were avoiding what they perceived to be a riskier form of transport, 954 more than who died on the planes used for the terrorist attacks.
But governments have to choose on our behalf which risks we should be exposed to.
That poses a difficult ethical dilemma: should government decisions about risk reflect the often irrational foibles of the populace or the rational calculations of sober risk assessment? Should our politicians opt for informed paternalism or respect for irrational preferences? The volcanic ash cloud is a classic case study. Were the government to allow flights to go ahead when the risks were equal to those of road travel, it is almost certain that, over the course of the year, hundreds of people would die in resulting air accidents, since around 2,500 die on the roads each year.
This is politically unimaginable, not for good, rational reasons, but because people are much more risk averse when it comes to plane travel than they are to driving their own cars.
So, in practice, governments do not make fully rational risk assessments. Their calculations are based partly on cost-benefit analyses, and partly on what the public will tolerate.
This means that that the price placed on a human life by different policies varies enormously. For example, the Train Protection and Warning System put in place after the Ladbroke Grove disaster cost £15.4m per life it has estimated to have saved.
What price a life?
On the other hand, when the US government allowed speed limits of freeways to be increased to 65mph, dividing the extra dollars earned due to efficiency gains by the number of lives lost resulted in a price of $1.54m (about £1m) per life.
In other words, one policy spent £15.4m pounds to save one life and the other sacrificed one life to generate an extra £1m for the economy.
There's a widespread feeling that it is immoral to put a price on a human life, but in practice governments can't make informed risk decisions without doing so, and we often implicitly support them. For instance, the cost effectiveness of drugs supplied by the NHS is determined in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (Nice).
Nice, usually determines a treatment not to be value for money if it costs more than £20,000-£30,000 per quality-adjusted life year (QALY) saved.
This seems absurdly small to many people, who would pay every last penny they had just to secure one QALY. But if any party went into this election proposing to double National Insurance contributions to double the value Nice puts on a QALY, I don't think many would vote for it.
We may not like to admit it, but we too think there is such a thing as putting too much value on a human life.
Indeed, you could argue that we all often value a life at less than £160. Research by the philosopher Peter Singer suggests the cost of saving a life in the developing world ranges from around $250 (about £160) - $3,500 (£2,270). Faced with the choice between risking someone's life in Africa and an optional new gadget, we routinely choose the latter.
What then is a government to do?
On the one hand, the most rational policy is to do whatever will be most effective in reducing risks. On the other, it is more democratic to take only the kinds of risks the populace is willing to take, valuing lives lost in the developing world less than lives lost on the road, which are in turn valued less than those lost in the air.
So which is more ethical, the rational or the democratic choice? I'll leave that for you to decide. You can be pretty sure, however, that as the government weighs up the rational and with public opinion in the case of the current flying restrictions, the latter will weigh more heavily than the former. That's democracy.
Julian Baggini is the author of Do They Think You're Stupid?: 100 Ways of Spotting Spin and Nonsense from the Media, Celebrities and Politicians (Granta)
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