What’s Wrong with Risk?

Abstract

Imposing pure risks—risks that do not materialise into harm—is sometimes wrong. The Harm Account explains this wrongness by claiming that pure risks are harms. By contrast, The Autonomy Account claims that pure risks impede autonomy. We develop two objections to these influential accounts. The Separation Objection proceeds from the observation that, if it is wrong to v then it is sometimes wrong to risk v‐ing. The intuitive plausibility of this claim does not depend on any account of the facts that ground moral wrongness. This suggests a close relationship between the factors that make an act wrong and the factors that make risking that act wrong, which both accounts fail to recognise. The Determinism Objection holds that both accounts fail to explain the wrongness of pure risks in a deterministic world. We then develop an alternative—The Buck‐Passing Account—that withstands both objections.

Dominating Risk Impositions

“… 9 Discussion of these cases is also found in Wolff 2003, Placani 2016 , Parr and Slavny 2019 , Finkelstein 2003 , Lazar 2019 , James 2016 , Cripps 2013 , Kumar 2019 and 2015, Burri 2020. …”

“… 7 Accounts that we set aside due to space constraints include rights-based approaches (cf. McCarthy 1997), Risk-as-Harm views (Finkelstein 2003 , Placani 2016 , Oberdiek 2012 , 2019 ), Murphy and Gardoni’s ( 2007 ) Capability View, Parr and Slavny’s ( 2019 ) Buck Passing View, and Wolff and de-Shalit’s (2003) Disadvantage View, to name a few. …”

“… 12 For criticism of Oberdiek’s account, cf. Parr and Slavny 2019 , Ferretti 2016 , Maheshwari 2021 . …”

Please wear a mask: a systematic case for mask wearing mandates

“…2.2 MWM mitigate moral wrongs . In some situations, individuals may justifiably impose non-negligible risks of severe harm on unconsenting others (57:83, 58 :296 on cases of self-defence; also 59 :273–5 on cases where ambulance drivers may justifiably drive more quickly than otherwise justified to save the lives of injured individuals). Still, failing to wear a mask in indoor settings where physical distancing is infeasible typically wrongs unconsenting others both because in such settings the expected benefits that maskless (vs masked) interactions yield to individuals typically fade in comparison with the non-negligible risks of severe harm prevented by mask wearing (Section 2.1) and because individuals have no right to impose non-negligible risks of severe harm on unconsenting others when they can avoid imposing such risks at a limited cost to themselves (Section 2.3).…”

“…Objective accounts take the probability of a given event (eg, Adam infecting Eve) to be determined by facts in the physical world that are independent of the involved individuals’ beliefs and these individuals’ assessment of the available evidence. Conversely, subjective accounts take the probability of a given event to be a measure of individuals’ degrees of belief about the likelihood of such event (18:972–3, 68:1439, 57:77; also 15 97:ch.2 in ref22 on the possibility of combining objective and subjective accounts). I do not expand on these accounts since I take my case for MWM to hold irrespective of the comparative merits of those accounts.…”