A strong memory from my fieldwork in Kenya and Ghana, during community mapping sessions, is of residents carefully marking the spots exposed to previous flood events. In some of spots, floods had left no visible damage, such as collapsed houses or displaced families. Yet people insisted on marking them. While in some parts of the city, risk materialises as a disaster every rainy season, in others, residents live under chronic exposure, where impacts come in uneven waves.
What struck me most was the difference between these residents and city planners during these mapping exercises. Both groups marked the areas of repeated materials losses, but residents also highlighted uncertain flood spots associated with invisible harms: sleepless nights, fear for vulnerable family members, and anxiety that the next storm might change everything.
This raised a moral question: can people be morally wronged by being exposed to flood risk, even when no disaster occurs? And if so, who bears the responsibility for that wrong, considering the risk imposition is systemic? I argue that chronic exposure in deprived urban contexts represents a form of wrongful risk imposition that calls for moral repair. Yet, a more complicated layer arises by the fact that responsibility is diffuse and residents often make constrained choices to remain in such exposed areas. In such circumstances, how much can we speak of moral repair when people choose between living in danger or not having a place to live at all?
The ethics of pure (flood) risk
Philosophers of risk examine cases where individuals are exposed to risk despite no actual harm materialising, so-called pure risk1. Scholars argue about the moral significance of this exposure and some claim that exposure itself can constitute a moral wrong, violating important moral values such as autonomy, safety, dignity and fairness2. The view relies on non-consequentialist accounts of risk imposition, where morality is not bound to outcomes, but to the moral relationship between risk imposer and risk bearer3. Under such accounts, the positional asymmetries arise because risk bearers become vulnerable to the imposerās decisions (or negligence). Utilitarian logic, by contrast, allows exposing few to risk if overall expected utility is maximised. Yet, Altham and other authors4 argue that risk imposition is fundamentally a moral relation between parties, with different interests and different thresholds for accepting risk imposition.
This moral relation is visible in flood-risk contexts. Flood exposure in deprived settlements violates peopleās safety and dignity long before any flood disaster strikes. To live in such area means enduring constant anxiety, Ā insecurity and the implicit implications of living in an area that is not considered worthy of formal protection. This risk is not neutral not randomly distributed. In geospatial terms, cities are physical expressions of policy decisions that accumulate over time and shape spatial inequalities: which areas receive sanitation, drainage, housing investment and which ones do not. Following the reasoning of the philosopher in ethics, Kritika Maheshwari, the moral wrong lies not only in exposure and the foreseeable material impacts but also in the governance systems that normalise differential exposure.
Such imposition undermines the idea that urban flood risk is shared equally. When a settlement is treated as informal, and thereby excluded from infrastructure provision and legal protection, a moral asymmetry is drawn: some lives are granted institutional protection, others are not. Each rainy season reinforces this structural disregard, a message of structural (and social) acceptance that some risks are permissible to certain population groups. This echoes with the philosopher Behnam Taebiās claim that institutionally acceptable risk may still be ethically unjust5.
Resilience planning thus requires recognition of moral imbalance sustained by institutional neglect and repair of damaged moral relationships. Yet, unlike individual cases of harm, urban flood risk emerges from many distributed actions (and actors) āland zoning practices, informal development and planning omissions. In such cases, everyone (and no one directly) seems responsible for morally wronging these communities. If sources of risk imposition are diffuse, who counts as the risk imposer?
Systemic nature of flood risk imposition
In complex urban environments, flood exposure cannot be attributed to a single actor. Exposure involves urban systems that have the probability of facing a flood event, like people, structures and assets6. Beyond environmental factors, exposure is also shaped by planning priorities, urban expansion, infrastructure provision, housing markets and institutional capacity. This diffuse responsibility is described by Thomson as the āproblem of many handsā 7.Ā Harm and injustice at the city level emerge from uncoordinated decisions (actions or omissions) of multiple agents.
Iris Marion Youngās theory of structural injustice8 helps conceptualise this. The author argues that structural injustice arises when social processes systematically disadvantage some groups without any individual intending the harm. In flood risk context, policymakers, landowners, urban planners, developers and society itself participate, directly or indirectly, in creating spatial and institutional conditions to sustain exposure.
This lens supports the idea of shared but differential moral responsibility. While many actors contribute to systemic exposure, not all have equal power to shape urban conditions. For example, governmental authorities who prioritise development in wealthier neighbourhoods or exclude deprived settlements bear greater moral responsibility than the individual indifferent to planning outcomes. Those with greater capacity and authority to prevent risks should carry a greater obligation for moral repair. Local planners, for instance, have power and resources to target drainage interventions in deprived settlements, both their action or inaction has direct consequences to residents. In this sense, the moral repair must begin with those who hold power to increase or reduce flood risk.
Conclusion
This first part has argued that chronic flood exposure in urban deprived areas is not merely a technical and environmental issue, but a moral one. Before disaster occurs, flood risk is structurally imposed on those with least power to avoid it, shaped by planning decisions, institutional and socioeconomic factors. In part 2, harder questions will be raised: how the constrained agency of the residents complicates moral responsibility, how knowledge and agency shape risk imposition and what moral repair could look like.
References
- Thomson, J. J. Imposing Risks. in Rights, Restitution and Risk (Harvard University Press, 1986).Maheshwari, K. Corrective Duties for Wrongful Pure RisksāÆ: A Pluralist Proposal. Forthcom. Law, Ethics, Philos. (2025).
- Altham, J. E. J. Ethics of risk. Proc. Aristot. Soc. 84, 15ā29 (1983).
- Nyholm, S. & Maheshwari, K. Dominating Risk Impositions. J. Ethics 613ā637 (2022). doi:10.1007/s10892-022-09407-4
- Taebi, B. Bridging the Gap between Social Acceptance and Ethical Acceptability. Risk Anal. 37, (2017)
- IPCC. Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Working Group II contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernamental Panel on Climate Change (Cambridge University Press, 2022). doi:10.1017/9781009325844
- Thompson, D. F. Moral Responsibility of Public OfficialsāÆ: The Problem of Many Hands. Am. Polit. Sci. Rev. 74, 905ā916 (1980).
- Young, I. M. RESPONSIBILITY AND GLOBAL JUSTICEāÆ: A SOCIAL CONNECTION MODEL *. Soc. Philos. Policy Found. 23, 102ā130 (2006).
Author Bio
Lorraine Oliveira is a PhD candidate at the University of Twente. Her research is an intersection of floods, urban planning and vulnerability. The work investigates frameworks of urban flood vulnerability in deprived urban areas in Africa. She is particularly interested in citizen science approaches.