The recent discussion around children’s phone use and the impact on their mental health, summarized by Cal Newport here underscores an important tension: the balance between waiting for clear scientific data and trusting our moral intuition.
Parents often feel uneasy about handing their children unrestricted access to potentially harmful digital content, even while research may still be gathering conclusive evidence. They know, from lived experience and moral instinct, that something about this exposure feels wrong and potentially harmful to their children’s flourishing. They don’t need perfect data to act on these concerns.
This dynamic mirrors the experience of many safety professionals in the workplace. Like parents, safety experts possess a moral intuition about the rightness of protecting human life and well-being. Safety professionals understand deeply that workers’ health and safety are paramount, not just a box to check, or a risk metric to optimize. We know from experience, empathy, and ethical grounding that unsafe conditions are harmful and unacceptable.
Yet, just as parents may struggle against societal pressure to demand hard data proving phone usage’s full impact, safety professionals often find themselves needing to generate and present data to persuade managers and executives about the importance of investing in safety initiatives. Many decision-makers in organizations, conditioned by numbers-driven approaches to business, may hesitate to prioritize safety improvements without clear, quantifiable evidence like injury rates, insurance claims, or cost-benefit analyses.
This need for data is understandable within a corporate culture that values measurable results. However, it can sometimes lead to a paralysis or delay in action, as if waiting for a perfect statistical “smoking gun” before protecting workers. Meanwhile, the moral imperative to prevent harm is clear, immediate, and compelling.
Just as parenting relies not only on science but on lived experience and moral intuition to foster children’s flourishing, workplace safety should be grounded in our ethical conviction that every worker deserves a safe environment. Data and metrics serve as useful tools to guide and optimize efforts, and to convince skeptical stakeholders, but they are not the source of the moral truth.
tl;dr:
• Parents’ moral intuition about protecting their children should come first, even with scientific uncertainty about phone harms.
• Similarly, safety professionals’ moral intuition about protecting workers largely needs no statistical proof to justify action.
• But, just like parents must sometimes navigate societal expectations and conflicting expert opinions, safety professionals often need data to persuade management and drive organizational change.
By honoring this balance of trusting intuition while leveraging data when necessary, safety professionals can more effectively advocate for the right course of action: putting worker safety at the forefront not just because numbers say so, but because it is fundamentally the right thing to do.
