Until very recently, normative theorizing in ethics was frequently conducted without even mentioning uncertainty. Just a few years ago, Sven Ove Hansson described this state of affairs with the slogan: “Ethics still lives in a Newtonian world.” In the new Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and...

In this paper commissioned by the U.S. National Bioethics Advisory Commission, the author demonstrates the conflicting models of risk analysis underlying the reports of an earlier commission, the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research and...