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.