Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
done before, and therefore what should be done in
a particular choice depends upon the sequence in
which choices are made. The underlying assump-
tion in the state approach is that there is nothing
left to learn; only then could we expect to recog-
nize a universally applicable, uniquely determin-
ing principle.
Equality is also about what differences ought to
be taken into account and conversely what differ-
ences ought not to be taken into account. Equality
asserts that some differences ought not to be taken
into account (e.g. in gender, ethnicity) but allow-
ance should be made for other differences (e.g. the
formal recognition of disability).
Whenconsideringfloodriskmanagement, there
isawidevarietyof initial inequalities thatmightbe
taken into consideration (Johnson et al. 2007).
Those starting inequalities include the:
.
Type of flooding, e.g. groundwater flooding,
sewer flooding, river flooding, flash flooding and
so on.
.
Likelihood of flooding.
.
Severity of flooding - depth, duration, velocity
and load.
.
Cost of reducing the risk; the cost per property
typically depends upon the local geometry so that
the cost of protecting a property will vary
dramatically.
.
Resources (power) available to those at risk to
ameliorate the risk, notably income but including
the form of tenure.
.
Resources available to cope with an event; they
differ depending on the extent and forms of power
available to them.
.
Resilience of those at risk - those at risk differ in
the power they have to drawon different resources
so as to recover from a shock such as a flood.
.
Contribution of those at risk to wider society.
Traditionally, flood risk management focused
on agriculture because when more than 50% of
household income was spent upon food, food
shortages and the resulting price rises meant that
people starved.
.
Power to choose where to locate. The poor get
the last choice of land, and that land is often
exposed to one or more hazards be these pollution,
slope instability or flooding.
2
The use of antithesis to define the core of jus-
tice. Thus it is often easier to specify what justice
does not include than to specify the nature of
justice itself. Hence, a common approach to
a definition of justice is by antithesis; by defining
what justice excludes. For example, the oath of
office of judges in the UK defines both what they
will do and what they will not do: '
...
.and I will do
right to all manner of people after the laws and
usages of this realm, without fear or favour, affec-
tion or ill will'. Hence, an important characteristic
of justice is what it excludes; thus, the statues of
the Roman goddess of law, Justicia, frequently
found on court buildings, are often shown with
a blindfold as well as a set of scales.
What both the concepts of consistency and
the wide use of antithesis to define justice share is
that an important aspect to justice is to distinguish
between differences that should be taken into con-
sideration and those that should not. Lloyd (1991)
asserts that a condition for justice is that: 'all
those inthe samecategoryshall be treatedas equal',
that is, in accordancewith the categories laid down
by law and not in either an arbitrary or biased
manner. Then a key question becomes defining
the 'same category': what makes those within that
category similar and different from others.
Is Justice Possible?
For the state approaches to the definition of justice
to be workable, there are two conditions thatmust
be satisfied:
1
the approach must be applicable across all
possible instances; and
2
it must produce a unique answer to every
possible instance.
These ambitious expectations and uniqueness
has to be bought at the cost of reducing the differ-
ences that are taken into account. In addition, in
a changing environment, equality is dynamic:
what achieves equality at one moment may not
consequently result in equality at a different time
since equality is a balancing act. Consequently,
equality exhibits path dependency (Green 2007):
what should be done now depends upon what was
