Risk and Ethics

Callista Wilson
Mr. Roddy
Global Politics and Historical Contexts

Peoples’ instincts to reduce monetary risk through insurance, welfare, and hedge funds, strongly relates to how they perceive and handle other risks in life. There are always things we can control, and cannot control. The things we can control determine our identities in more subjective, human ways, whereas events or situations beyond our control determine our motivations, bodies of experience, and overall resilience. In finances, risk is natural and unavoidable. People can try to predict the future, however uncertainty still remains to varying degrees depending on what is being predicted, and depending on peoples’ confidence; which can sometimes change without clear explanations. Countries which implement welfare programs such as the United States and Japan help those experiencing hardship or exploitation by ensuring base-level support at a minimum. Although welfare reduces risk for individuals, it can hurt nations by bolstering inflation. In this sense, reducing risk for individuals can increase risk for a nation’s economy, and that works the other way around if, for example, support is privatized, reducing inflation but narrowing who can afford insurance. In both finances and more personal aspects of life, set amounts of risk are usually not dissolved, however, people and nations can decide how to tip the scales: protecting one thing at the expense of another, or vice versa. Untimely, we must not pretend that risk can just go away. Instead we need to play directly into its game: shifting our positions to optimize present priorities, and deciding what to put at stake and what to defend.

Important questions about risk are not about overpowering it, because if that is possible, there is no dilemma. Important questions are about managing risk, because taking pressure off one thing often puts it on another. If risk is inevitable, should it be steered away from economies or away from individuals? Or when someone needs defending at the expense of yourself, what is the right thing to do? These decisions are within our control, and define us, or at least our ethics. Ultimately, risk is both technical and human. The likelihood of certain events based on certain actions can be estimated, but people are equipped to decide what is moral, and what should be done after knowledge is gathered. People must learn to evaluate and allocate risk instead of fearing it, or believing it can be simplified. This way, people can make wise decisions about investing in various types of insurance, and about other choices which hold gravity.     

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