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We frequently engage in activities that impose a risk of serious harm on innocent others in order to realise trivial benefits for ourselves or third parties. Many moral theories tie the evidence-relative permissibility of engaging in such activities to the . I argue that we should move away from such a reliance on when conceptualising morally permissible risk imposition. Under most circumstances of interest, a conscientious reasoner will identify a gap between the factors they deem potentially relevant to the riskiness of an agent's behaviour, and the factors they are reasonably able to quantify. This then leads a conscientious reasoner to conclude that they cannot, in good faith, come up with a quantitative risk estimate that is genuinely tailored to the agent's particular situation. Based on this, I argue that principles of morally permissible risk imposition fail to provide us with practical guidance if they ask us to take into account our agent-specific risks in a quantified manner. I also argue that principles of permissible risk imposition which appeal to quantified individual risks implausibly imply that it is frequently indeterminate whether engaging in some risky activity is morally permissible. For both of these reasons, I contend that principles of morally permissible risk imposition should make no reference to quantified individual risks. They should instead acknowledge that any quantitative estimates that an agent might usefully be able to consider will likely not be tailored to the agent's idiosyncratic situation.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03888-4 | DOI Listing |
JMIR Res Protoc
September 2025
Macquarie School of Education, Faculty of Arts, Macquarie University, Macquarie Park, Australia.
Background: Interventions targeting the psychomotor domain of learning have been the most dominant in the physical education (PE) discipline. However, as PE also incorporates a holistic perspective of student development, a gap has emerged where interventions targeting social outcomes are not frequently analysed. Social outcomes have been of particular interest for interventions conducted in PE.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMed Humanit
September 2025
Faculty of Medicine, Marmara University, Istanbul, Turkey.
Tracing the evolution of informed consent from the Hippocratic tradition to the Ottoman Empire reveals its enduring role as a fundamental ethical principle supporting patient autonomy. Spanning diverse medical and cultural landscapes-including Ancient Greece, Byzantium, Islamic medicine and Ottoman legal practices-this historical trajectory uncovers a continuous and evolving dialogue between physicians and patients. It reflects a persistent recognition of the moral and practical necessity for physicians to share medical information and for patients to engage voluntarily in decisions regarding their health.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBehav Sci (Basel)
July 2025
School of Psychology, Shaanxi Normal University, Xi'an 710062, China.
Automated vehicles controlled by artificial intelligence are becoming capable of making moral decisions independently. This study investigates the differences in participants' perceptions of the moral decision-maker's permissibility when viewing scenarios (pre-test) and after witnessing the outcomes of moral decisions (post-test). It also investigates how permissibility, ten typical moral emotions, and perceived moral agency fluctuate when AI and the human driver make deontological or utilitarian decisions in a pedestrian-sacrificing dilemma (Experiment 1, = 254) and a driver-sacrificing dilemma (Experiment 2, = 269) from a third-person perspective.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHealth Care Anal
August 2025
University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark.
Cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) is a mainstay of contemporary health care priority setting. However, priority setting in reference to cost-effectiveness may discriminate against people with disabilities. The ethical literature on priority setting suggests that the permissibility of such discrimination varies with the reason why people with disabilities receive lower priority.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBMC Nurs
August 2025
Morristown Medical Center, Morristown, New Jersey, 07960, USA.
Background: The goal of this study was to record and analyze the initial and lingering thoughts and reactions that 41 clinical nurses experienced while caring for individuals hospitalized with COVID-19 during the initial April 2020 surge and over the next 15 months while vaccines and effective treatments became available. The sample represented a diverse group of nurses at one American health care institution in terms of gender identity, age, ethnic group, years of experience, clinical specialty area, and hospital shift worked. At the time of this April surge, nurses were exposed to a virus with no standard treatments and high mortality rates.
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