Essays on the Morality of Risk Impositions

This thesis is a collection of five self-standing articles that engage with normative and applied
questions surrounding the morality of risk impositions. The first part of the thesis considers
the question of what makes imposing pure risks on others, namely, risks that don’t
materialize sometimes morally wrong. Suppose that you are taking a leisurely walk in the park
when an inconsiderate speeding motorist drives right past you. In doing so, he imposes upon
you a grave risk of harm. Luckily for you, the risk fails to materialize. Yet, there is a strong
intuition that in subjecting you to risk, he acts wrongly, and also wrongs you in particular.
Chapter 1 argues that imposing pure risks on others, like in the case of the speeding motorist,
is sometimes wrong because it involves relating to others in a dominating, or a dominationlike way. Chapter 2 critiques an influential view according to which, imposing pure risks is
sometimes wrong when and because risk itself is contingently or constitutively harmful.
Chapter 3 explores the explanatory relationship between the morality of imposing pure risks
and that of non-risky cases. The second part of the thesis deals in two distinct questions
within applied risk ethics, and in particular, pertinent global catastrophic risks facing
humanity. Chapter 4 dives into the ethics of extinction risk and asks whether permanent loss
of possible people is a relevant wrong-making feature of failing to prevent the risk of our
extinction materializing. Chapter 5 contributes to recent discussions in the literature on ethics
of climate change risks. In particular, it discusses and rejects a prominent objection against
offsetting our risky emissions, namely, that by offsetting, we fail to fulfil our duties not to
harm or risking harming particular individuals.