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2 Stud. Ethics L. & Tech. 1 (2008)

handle is hein.journals/selt2 and id is 1 raw text is: Evans: Death in Traffic INTRODUCTION Annually 1.2 million human beings are killed on the world's roads.' Most of the victims are young, and prior to their crashes were healthy with expected normal life spans in normal health. Most are not drivers -- worldwide most victims are pedestrians. Injuries vastly outnumber fatalities. Traffic harm flows from many decisions made at many levels, from individual road users to leaders of industry and government. The decisions are steeped in ethical issues, yet ethical issues are largely ignored. Indeed, the only relevant paper I could find in the professional literature begins Philosophers should begin to think more seriously about the many moral issues that arise from our frequent use of personal motor vehicles.2 Discussing any aspect of traffic should be based on knowledge of its characteristics. One cannot discuss, say, the ethics of a medical procedure unless you have knowledge of what condition it addresses, what alternative options are available, what are its risks of success, what are its risks of making the patient more sick, and so on. The source of such knowledge is scientific inquiry, as reported in scientific literature. All too often traffic safety policy makers think that they are experts on traffic safety simply because they drive. They would be ridiculed if they claimed expertise in pulmonology because they breathe. Any discussion of ethical issues in traffic safety must rest upon what is known from science about the subject. Traffic safety has been studied as a scientific subject for more than 70 years, with a large body of reliable information accumulated in many peer-reviewed technical journals. For example, a paper submitted to the American Journal of Psychology in August 1937 contains insights that are often ignored today, and references to even earlier work.3 The body of scientific information is summarized in a book4 that will be a key source for this article. Traffic safety research establishes that vehicle characteristics affect safety, but not nearly as much as roadway factors. Roadway factors do not affect safety nearly as much as human factors, especially the behavior of drivers. It is the behavior of those whose lives are at stake in traffic that most influences risk in traffic. The least safe vehicle driven on the least safe road by some drivers poses far less risk than the safest vehicle driven on the safest road by other drivers. While it is easy to say that drivers have a personal moral responsibility to not harm others, this ignores wider issues. Do drivers adequately understand that their normal driving poses an unreasonable threat to others? If not, why not? Have drivers been misinformed? If so, by whom, and for what purposes? While the individual driver is the final agent, other institutions contribute hugely to how individual drivers behave, and accordingly bear a major moral responsibility for traffic harm. 1

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