Responsibility in the face of Uncertainty
LSE Philosophy Professor Roman Frigg gave the first Public Lecture under the Market Economies and Green Ideals project, funded by the John Templeton Foundation, at King's College London. The talk was titled 'Responsibility in the face of Uncertainty: Complex Cyclone Models as an Effective Guide to Anticipatory Action' and is now available online.
Many important decisions are based on models that offer representations of complex physical systems. However, these models often face uncertainty. We present an approach to decision-making involving multiple models in situations of severe uncertainty and show how this approach can be employed to develop a confidence-sensitive decision support tool for anticipatory humanitarian action. We apply the tool to the case of Cyclone Kenneth, which made landfall in Mozambique in April 2019. Comparing the level and timing of the alerts that were actually triggered with the alerts recommended by the tool shows that even a moderately an uncertainty-intolerant decision-maker would have acted earlier had they used the tool, thereby considerably reducing the cyclone’s impact. The approach therefore has the potential to contribute to a sustainable management of environmental risks, and it suggests institutional structures to do so.