It is so odd that Safety talks about: ‘human error’, ‘human and organisational performance’, ‘human factors’ and yet none of these talk about human personhood.

Indeed, texts on human error by Reason, Dekker and others have no focus at all on what it is to be human or the nature of being human. Such books really shouldn’t have the word ‘human’ in the title, they are just texts about error not human being.

Similarly, for texts in HOP and Human Factors. How strange this assumption that we all know what human being is and ‘being’ human. How interesting this constant use of the word ‘human’ but no discussion on the nature of human being or personhood in any of these texts. Why?

I think such discussion is absent from Safety texts because, safety has never shown any interest in dialogue across disciplines eg. in Anthropology, Ontology, Ethics or Philosophy. Transdisciplinarity is essential if safety ever wants to become professional. I’ll give a quick example.

I had a fascinating question I put to someone on LinkedIn from one of the safety associations urging safety people to do a 2 hour ethics course.

– I ask a simple question: ‘was the course designed by an ethicist?’.

– The answer came back promptly: ‘no, it was developed by safety professionals and instructional designers’.

– I wrote back and asked: ‘why did you use instructional designers’?

How strange that Safety can see the need to consult an expert in instructional design but not an expert in ethics!

This is what safety does. Once you have that safety qualification and all those post nominals after your name, you now become: lawyer, surgeon, anthropologist, culture expert, historian, philosopher and every stop to the end of the safety train line.

What is the point of writing a text on human error or human factors if you don’t discuss the nature of being human? What is the point if you assume we all know what it is to be a person?

I guess what is worse, is the constant semiotics and language of heroics that infuses safety as if to say. Safety doesn’t want fallible humans in safety, it just wants heroes. Even worse are all these safety texts with covers of cogs, hard hats, PPE and machines. None of this ahs anything to do with humans.

In SPoR, we spend a great deal of time in our books and workshops focusing on the ontology of being human and human ‘being’. Similarly, and especially in our approach to ethics, we focus a great deal on what it is to be a person and the nature of human personhood. IF these are not a part of your ethics course, then, you’re not studying ethics.

If you are interested in what it is to be human there are plenty of places to start. Perhaps one of our free books, that have the word ‘being’ in the title might help:

or any of the following are helpful:

• Bateson, G., (1972) Steps to an Ecology of Mind. University of Chicago Press, London.
• Colombetti, G., The Feeling Body, Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind. MIT Press, London.
• Damasio, A., (1999) The Feeling of What happens, Body and Emotions in the Making of Consciousness. Harvest Books, New York.
• Fuchs, T., (2021) In Defense of the Human Being Foundational Questions of an Embodied Anthropology. Oxford University Press. London.
• Johnson, M., (2014) Morality for Humans, Ethical Understanding from the Perspective of Cognitive Science. University of Chicago Press. Chicago.
• Lakoff, G., and Johnson, M., (1999). Philosophy in the Flesh, The Embodied Mind and Its Challenges to Western Thought. Basic Books, New York.
• Martin, J., Sugarman, J., and Hickinbottom, S., (eds.,) (2010) Persons, Understanding Psychological Selfhood and Agency. Springer. Bumaby Canada.
• Noe, A., (2009) Out of Our Heads, Why You Are Not Your Brain and Other Lessons from The Biology of Consciousness. Hill and Wang. New York.
• Norretranders, T., (1991) The User Illusion, Cutting Consciousness Down to Size. Penguin. London.
• Palmer, P., (1993) To Know as We are Known, Education as a Spiritual Journey. Harper. San Franscico.
• Raaven, H., (2013). The Self Beyond Itself, An Alternative History of Ethics, the New Brain Sciences and the Myth of Free Will. The New Press. New York.
• Ramachandran, V. S., (2004) A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness. PI Books, New York.
• Ricoeur, P., (1986) Fallible Man. Fordham University Press. New York
• Semler, L., Hodge, B., and Kelly, P., (2012) What is the Human? Australian Scholarly. North Melbourne.
• Shepherd, P., (2017) Radical Wholeness, The Embodied Present and the Ordinary Grace of Being. North Atlantic Books. Berkeley.
• Taylor, C., (1992) Sources of the Self, The Making of the Modern Identity. Harvard University Press. New York.
• Thompson, E., (2010) Mind in Life, Biology, Phenomenology, and the Science of the Mind. Belknap Press. London
• Tournier, P., (1947 ) The Whole Person in a Broken World. Harper, Row and Publishers. New
• York (https://archive.org/details/wholepersoninbro00tour/ page/n5/mode/2up)
• Varela, F., Thompson, E ., and Rosch, E., (1993) The Embodied Mind, Cognitive Science and Human Experience. MIT Press, London.