Safety is the preservation of value

The questions 'what is safety?' and 'what is it that safety researcher's study?' are at the very core of safety research as an academic discipline. One might therefore assume that the discipline is based on clear answers to these questions, answers that are unanimously shared among the great majority of safety researchers. Strangely enough, this is not the case, and this lack of consensus is a major problem, because, as Leveson (2020) points out, without it "everyone starts from a different definition of safety and communication is inhibited." By 2014 this lack of clarity and consensus had become so obvious that there was an entire journal special issue dedicated to the topic. That discussion led to a clarification of the problems, but failed to solve them. Several contributors have since proposed solutions, none of which have gained widespread support.

This paper argues that there is still a gap in our theoretical conceptualization, and proposes that safety fundamentally refers to positive value: specifically, the quality of experiences and objects that make people desire them. It is not operations, or persons, or objects that are safe, it is the various valuable qualities that can be lost and that are safe as long as they are preserved. As the future is fundamentally uncertain, all attempts at preserving values or valuables for a desired duration can only rest on assessments of the probability that one will manage to preserve them. Hence, this study proposes the following definition: Safety is the material, emotional and mental state that obtains when it is highly probable that all relevant positive values will be preserved for a desired duration, and the knowledge supporting this probability assessment is strong.