When the best effort at Ethics is the AIHS BoK Chapter on Ethics (https://safetyrisk.net/a-guide-to-tokenism-in-ethics-in-safety/) you don’t have to argue about whether safety is professional. Of course, it isn’t.

There can be no claim to professionalism without a mature and well-articulated Ethic, not this duty-to-safety nonsense from the AIHS. Indeed, all of the most significant issues in Ethics are omitted from this chapter! It is also clear that when Safety wants to study moral philosophy and culture it seeks advice from an engineering worldview. Similarly, if you want to know about culture, consult engineering or better still: ‘don’t talk about it!’.

However, the real crunch when it comes Ethics and safety is its many silences, all the things safety never talks about (https://safetyrisk.net/safety-culture-silences/). Moreso, when Safety talks about innovation and creative endeavor, it ensures that this is decoupled from any discussion of Ethics. For example, this week the HOP safety group are running a conference on innovation in Wollongong NSW, and nothing on the program concerns any discourse on ethics or moral philosophy.

There can be no discussion of innovation in safety without consideration of an ethic of personhood. Nothing is innovative unless it is person-centric and humanising.

Indeed, if there is no movement in worldview (methodology) from Traditional safety, there is no ‘safety differently’. This includes a clearly articulated moral philosophy and ethic.

Unless this so called ‘new view’ includes a well-articulated ethic, how can one know whether anything including, language about ‘’learning, is innovative? Thank goodness the conference dropped the nonsense language of ‘the science of zero harm’. There is nothing ethical about an ideology that demonises fallible humans (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/zero-the-great-safety-delusion/). Yet, we still see from the safety differently group nonsense discourse about the impossible (https://safetyofwork.com/episodes/ep-113-when-are-seemingly-impossible-goals-good-for-performance).

Any idea that ‘zero is the only moral goal’ comes from safety engineers and behaviourists with no expertise in Ethics. There can be no moral outcome from an ideology of perfectionism for mortal persons.

Similarly, something cannot be claimed to be innovative unless it considers the by-products and trade-offs embedded in the bias of its design and, its outcomes for persons.

If you are interested in an ethic of personhood and a moral consideration of risk and innovation you can study here: https://cllr.com.au/product/an-ethic-of-risk-workshop-unit-17-elearning/ or, register for the SPoR Convention in May where the program tackles the critical issues of personhood, personality and risk (https://spor.com.au/canberra-convention/).