Whilst it is one thing to have a belief in some understanding about risk and safety, it’s a completely another thing to understand its ethical outcomes. More so, to understand ethical outcomes in a longitudinal sense not just in the nature of lower order short term goals (https://safetyrisk.net/understanding-safety-goals/ ).

Safety beliefs are inter-connected and inter-affected in all areas of work and living. If I believe people are objects in a system, there is an ethical outcome for that belief. If I believe that there is a hierarchy of control, there is an ethical outcome for that belief.

Beliefs turn into enactments otherwise they are not really a belief.

We need to understand that there are layers of belief that have an affect. Whilst I can believe an idea, it is very different to have a belief in a person. Whilst I can believe in a myth, it is very different to claim that myth as truth. Belief is about much more than just cognition, like sitting for a school test for comprehension. I can comprehend something but still not believe in it.

Belief without movement is not belief.

Knowing how, knowing what and knowing it, is not the same as putting such cognitions into action.

Some even talk about core beliefs, intermediate belief and advanced belief. Some also talk about belief ‘systems’.

We have some idea of how beliefs are constructed as is represented in this map. Understanding each component of this map gives some idea about belief formation and also belief enactment and the challenges of un-belief.

In an age of mis-information and dis-information (https://assets.cambridge.org/97811088/43058/frontmatter/9781108843058_frontmatter.pdf ), it is more important than ever that people have critical skills in Critical Discourse Analysis, Historiography, Media Studies and Ethics. Without such skills, it is so easy for the forces of Propaganda and Indoctrination to use the Media to create mythical truth.

A good place to start in understanding the Ethics of Belief is with Matheson and Vitz (The Ethics of Belief, Individual and Social. Oxford. London). It might also be helpful to read our book The Ethics of Risk, A Transdisciplinary Semiotic Lens (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/the-ethics-of-risk/). Both books bring to the fore how belief as enacted can demonise humans and destroy personhood.

Without a well-articulated ethic that has a focus on the nature of power, personhood and human ‘being’, it’s not likely that one would understand the trajectory of their own beliefs.

Whilst I can believe that 2 + 2 = 4, it’s quite another thing to believe that Safety has a right to over-ride the rights of cultures (https://safetyrisk.net/safety-gives-me-the-right-to-over-ride-your-rite/).

Any discourse about ‘over-riding’ the cultural rights of others in the name of ‘safety’ is unethical.

Any deontological ethic of duty that doesn’t disclose what that duty is to, is unethical.

Sadly, the safety industry has a long-long way to go before it embraces and takes seriously an ethic of risk.

The beginning of understanding an ethic of belief is to see what such a belief does to persons.

For example. Just take the HOP slogan of ‘blame fixes nothing’ and take its natural trajectory to anyone who has suffered an injustice. Imagine telling a rape victim that ‘blame fixes nothing’. Imagine telling an abused child that ‘blame fixes nothing’. Such slogans are deceptive and inherently un-ethical. Most slogans hide a vice and demonstrate a lack of expertise in ethics. It is even worse when such amateurish stuff is paraded as a ‘principle’ when it is not.

If one had any expertise in Ethics, one would know that the 5 slogans of HOP are NOT principles. But we know their attraction. The five HOP slogans appeal to the base of traditional safety that doesn’t want to consider the complexities of ethics and just prefers power to brutalise others in the name of good. More so, how seductive to watch all these lemmings repeat and repeat that these five slogans are ‘principles’. Such is the nature of an industry that is yet to place any priority on an ethic of risk.

So, if we look at the many safety beliefs (https://safetyrisk.net/safety-beliefs-by-semiotic-evidence/; https://safetyrisk.net/more-safety-beliefs-by-semiotics/) we see many beliefs that foster: dehumanisation, equating safety to numerics, hierarchical controls, linear causality, duty to safety, zero ideology, binary judgmentalism and brain-centrism.

In all of these beliefs we don’t see any focus on an ethic of risk, moral meaning as foundational to safety or even a remote interest in seeking to articulate the methodology hidden behind these beliefs. It seems, as long as the slogan can sell, the longitudinal outcome is of little interest.

If however, you are interested in an ethic that puts a positive and practical focus on personhood, humanising risk and, presenting a clear methodology, then you could start reading here: https://www.humandymensions.com/product/the-ethics-of-risk/