Ethics of Risk

This is a pre-proof version of a paper, co-authored with Joseph Wu, forthcoming in Social Theory and Practice

Screening for asymptomatic disease is a routine aspect of contemporary public health practice. However, it is also controversial, because it leads to overdiagnosis and overtreatment, with many arguing that programmes are "ineffective", i.e. the "costs" outweigh the "benefits". This paper explores a more fundamental objection to screening programmes: that, even if they are effective, they are ethically impermissible because they breach the principle of non-maleficence. In so doing, it suggests a new approach to the ethics of risk, justifying a concern with how policies affect individuals' absolute ex-ante prospects. Part 1 sets up the tension between screening and non-maleficence. Part 2 introduces and motivates a novel interpretation of the non-maleficence principle, "ex-ante Do No Harm", which resolves this tension. Part 3 defends and clarifies this principle by discussing its relationship to the ex-ante Pareto principle. Part 4 discusses the worry that risk estimates are too "subjective".

How should policymakers respond to the risk of technological unemployment that automation brings? I develop a procedure for answering this question that consults, rather than usurps, individuals' own attitudes and ambitions towards that risk. I call this the insurance argument. A distinctive virtue of this view is that it dispenses with the need to appeal to a class of controversial reasons about the value of employment, and so is consistent with the demands of liberal political morality. Second, I appeal to the insurance argument to show that governments ought not simply to provide those who are displaced by machines with unemployment benefits. Instead, it must offer retraining programmes, as well as enact more general macroeconomic policies that create new opportunities for employment. My contribution is important not only because it helps us to resolve a series of urgent policy disputes-disputes that have been discussed extensively by labour market economists and policymakers, but less so by political philosophers-but also because my analysis sheds light on more general philosophical controversies relating to risk.

The article is a plea for ethicists to regard probability as one of their most important concerns. It outlines a series of topics of central importance in ethical theory in which probability is implicated, often in a surprisingly deep way, and lists a number of open problems. Topics covered include: interpretations of probability in ethical contexts; the evaluative and normative significance of risk or uncertainty; uses and abuses of expected utility theory; veils of ignorance; Harsanyi's aggregation theorem; population size problems; equality; fairness; giving priority to the worse off; continuity; incommensurability; nonexpected utility theory; evaluative measurement; aggregation; causal and evidential decision theory; act consequentialism; rule consequentialism; and deontology.

Wie sollen sich autonome Fahrzeuge verhalten, wenn ein Unfall nicht mehr abwendbar ist? Die Komplexität spezifischer moralischer Dilemmata, die in diesem Kontext auftreten können, lässt bewährte ethische Denktraditionen an ihre Grenzen stoßen. Dieser Aufsatz versteht sich als Versuch, neue Lösungsperspektiven mithilfe einer risikoethischen Sichtweise auf die Problematik zu eröffnen und auf diese Weise deren Relevanz für die Programmierung von ethischen Unfallalgorithmen aufzuzeigen. Im Zentrum steht dabei die Frage, welche Implikationen sich aus einer Auffassung von Dilemma-Situationen als risikoethische Verteilungsprobleme im Hinblick auf die Zulässigkeit von entsprechenden Risikoübertragungen ergeben. Dabei wird zunächst eine risikoethische Interpretation des zugrundeliegenden Entscheidungsproblems skizziert, welches durch seine dilemmatische Struktur eine besondere Risikokonstellation begründet. Ausgehend von den Positionen von Sven Ove Hansson und Julian Nida-Rümelin wird für einen deontologisch-risikoethischen Ansatz argumentiert, der auf Individualrechten einerseits und einer interpersonell gerechten Verteilung der entstehenden Schadensrisiken anderseits basiert. Diese beiden Kriterien werden für den Anwendungskontext des autonomen Fahrens konkretisiert. Zum einen wird in Bezug auf das erste Kriterium argumentiert, dass individuelle Rechte genau dann als angemessen gewahrt gelten können, wenn die resultierenden Risikoübertragungen auf die Einzelnen in ihrer absoluten Höhe jeweils zumutbar sind (absolutes Prinzip). Zum anderen werden Schwierigkeiten skizziert, die sich hinsichtlich der konkreten Umsetzung des zweiten Kriteriums der Verteilungsgerechtigkeit (relatives Prinzip) ergeben. In diesem Zusammenhang werden beispielsweise ethische Herausforderungen in Bezug auf einen möglichen Vorteilsausgleich, das Prinzip der Schadensminimierung sowie individuell unterschiedliche Ausgangsbedingungen der persönlichen Schadensreduktion kritisch in den Blick genommen.

(English version:)
How should self-driving cars react in cases of unavoidable collisions? The complexity of specific dilemma situations that might arise in the context of autonomous driving pushes well-established ethical traditions of thought to their limits. This paper attempts to open up new opportunities for approaching this issue. By reframing the underlying decision problem from the perspective of ethics of risk, it is argued that the latter is highly relevant for the programming of ethical crash algorithms. The paper’s main contribution lies in providing an interpretation of dilemma situations as ethical problems of risk distribution as well as an outline of the resulting implications in terms of the permissibility of imposing these risks. Initially, moral dilemmas are shown to constitute a particularly challenging risk constellation. Drawing upon the positions of Sven Ove Hansson and Julian Nida-Rümelin, the paper makes the case for a deontological approach based on individual rights on the one hand and a fair distribution of the resulting risks of damage on the other hand. These two criteria are applied to and further elaborated in the context of self-driving car dilemmas. With regard to the first criterion, it is argued that individual rights could be considered to be adequately safeguarded if, and only if, the resulting levels of risk imposition on the individual are acceptable (absolute principle). Besides, some difficulties that emerge in the context of the second criterion of distributive justice (relative principle) are outlined. At this point, various ethical challenges such as the compensation of potential benefits, the principle of harm minimisation, and fundamental differences in individuals’ possibilities of reducing personal harm are critically examined.

On the agent-relativity thesis, what an agent ought to do is a function of the evidence available to her about the consequences of her potential actions. On the objectivity thesis, what an agent ought to do is a function of what the consequences of her potential actions would be, regardless of the evidence available to her. This article argues for the agent-relativity thesis. The main opposing argument, due to Thomson, points to cases where a bystander can see that an agent is about to do something which, unknown to the agent, would have terrible consequences, and says to the agent: "You ought not to do that!" The bystander's utterance seems true, but it is argued that this is consistent with the agent-relativity thesis, which also enjoys support from other directions.

New technology brings great benefits, but it can also create new and significant risks. When evaluating those risks in policymaking, there is a tendency to focus on social acceptance. By solely focusing on social acceptance, we could, however, overlook important ethical aspects of technological risk, particularly when we evaluate technologies with transnational and inter-generational risks. I argue that good governance of risky technology requires analyzing both social acceptance and ethical acceptability. Conceptually, these two notions are mostly complementary. Social acceptance studies are not capable of sufficiently capturing all the morally relevant features of risky technologies; ethical analyses do not typically include stakeholders' opinions, and they therefore lack the relevant empirical input for a thorough ethical evaluation. Only when carried out in conjunction are these two types of analysis relevant to national and international governance of risky technology. I discuss the Rawlsian wide reflective equilibrium as a method for marrying social acceptance and ethical acceptability. Although the rationale of my argument is broadly applicable, I will examine the case of multinational nuclear waste repositories in particular. This example will show how ethical issues may be overlooked if we focus only on social acceptance, and will provide a test case for demonstrating how the wide reflective equilibrium can help to bridge the proverbial acceptance-acceptability gap.

One of the defining characteristics of much contemporary nonconsequentialist thought is skepticism about interpersonal aggregation. Aggregative moral reasoning frequently yields counterintuitive implications, especially in cases where it enjoins us to let a few people suffer large losses so that many people can enjoy smaller benefits. To avoid these implications, leading nonconsequentialists have put forward “competing claims” models of moral rightness, according to which morality requires us to determine, by a series of pairwise comparisons, that action or policy which satisfies the strongest individual claim or generates the weakest individual complaint. The fullest development of this anti-aggregative approach is the contractualist moral theory defended by T.M. Scanlon. My paper examines a problem for the competing claims model: Outside the context of crime and war, most instances of serious harm don’t occur in situations where someone trades off certain harms to known individuals against certain benefits to other known individuals. Rather, most harm to others results from risks that some agent imposed on them in pursuit of some benefit for them, for the agent, or for others. The question is whether contractualists can provide a plausible account of such risky actions while honoring their anti-aggregative commitments. I focus on one class of risky actions – what I call instances of social risk – which are pervasive, indeed ineliminable from the conduct of large-scale public policy, yet prima facie troubling for the contractualist. They are characterized by the following four features: (1) The risky action will affect a large number of individuals. Because of this, it is virtually certain that some people will end up being burdened by it. (2) The individual losses to those who are burdened are considerably greater than the individual gains for those who are benefited. (3) The action-type in question is rare, or rarely affects the same people twice; as a result, we cannot assume that over time almost everyone will benefit from a principle that permits actions of this type to be performed. (4) The risky action is intuitively permissible. I submit that many actions in public policy, particularly in the domains of public health and of risk management, share these four features. The problem of social risk forces the contractualist to confront a question about his theory that, I argue, has not received a fully satisfactory answer to date: Are an individual’s personal reasons for rejecting a principle permitting the imposition of a given social risk a function of the prospect that the risky action gives to each person ex ante, allowing us to discount both benefits and harms by their improbability of occurring? Or is justifiability to each person a function of the action’s outcomes ex post? In that case, what would matter morally isn’t the ex ante likelihood of any given individual’s being benefited or harmed by the action, but rather the near certainty that, ex post, some persons will turn out to have been harmed by the action while others are benefited. The contractualist faces an apparent dilemma: if he rejects the ex ante view of justification, as Scanlon explicitly does in What We Owe to Each Other, and appeals instead to an ex post view, he seems committed to the intuitively unappealing conclusion that most instances of social risk are unjustifiable. On the other hand, if he embraces an ex ante view, Scanlon fears that this will move his contractualist theory too close to those aggregative views that he wished to escape from in the first place. In my paper, I elaborate a version of contractualism, what I call stage-wise ex ante contractualism, that solves the problem of social risk without resorting to interpersonal aggregation. My solution, however, comes at a price: Contractualism can no longer claim to be the correct account of what it is for an action to be morally wrong, all things considered. Instead, contractualism can at most claim to capture one class of moral considerations that contribute to making actions right or wrong all things considered.

Several authors have argued that contractualism faces a dilemma when it comes to justifying risks generated by socially valuable activities. At the heart of the matter is the question of whether contractualists should adopt an ex post or an ex ante perspective when assessing whether an action or policy is justifiable to each person. In this paper I argue for the modest conclusion that ex post contractualism is a live option notwithstanding recent criticisms raised by proponents of the ex ante perspective. I then consider how an ex post contractualist can best respond to the problem that it seems to prohibit a range of intuitively permissible and socially valuable activities.

This discussion paper aims to elaborate on the issue or risk communication by situating it in a governance perspective that starts from the question of what it would imply to fairly deal with the complexity of nuclear risk governance. Taking into account the focus of the seminar in which this paper was invited as a contribution (namely the post-accident conditions in Fukushima), I also chose to enlarge the scope of the paper and to elaborate on the idea of fair risk governance in general and on conditions for post-Fukushima social justice in particular instead of restricting it to the ‘too narrow’ emphasis on risk communication as such.

The reason is that the idea of ‘effective’ risk communication, although valuable in itself, remains problematic if not taken up as a necessary element of concern of a fair approach to risk governance. As nuclear energy risk assessment in general has to take into account knowledge-related uncertainties and value judgements, one can understand that all nuclear energy risk perception is ‘relative’, not only with citizens, but also with activists, scientists, engineers and policy makers. How good the intentions may be, one has to acknowledge that the approach to effective risk communication remains paternalistic if seen only as a one-directional transfer of information from ‘experts’ to ‘lay people’ instead of as a dialogue set up as a mutual learning experience. Therefore, from a social justice perspective, involving the (potentially) affected in making sense of the risks and in consequent decision making should be the prime concern.

In Fukushima, the uncertainties and fears among the population with regard to possible negative health effects of low doses are not only due to ‘ineffective communication’. Currently, scientific discussions are going on with regard to possible concrete health effects in the areas under investigation, and the Linear Non-Threshold hypothesis and the current limit of 1 mSv per year for the public should therefore be maintained as the principles to inform post-accident governance. In Fukushima, the issue of the so-called ‘100 mSv threshold’ is an issue in urgent need of formal public deliberation among all concerned actors. Although there is major scientific support for the vision that no such threshold exists, it now serves post-accident politics that are not to the benefit of the citizens.

Since a couple of decades, the notion of a precautionary principle plays a central and increasingly influential role in international as well as national policy and regulation regarding the environment and the use of technology. Urging society to take action in the face of potential risks of human activities in these areas, the recent focus on climate change has further sharpened the importance of this idea. However, the idea of a precautionary principle has also been problematised and criticised by scientists, scholars and policy activists, and been accused of almost every intellectual sin imaginable: unclarity, impracticality, arbitrariness and moral as well as political unsoundness. In that light, the very idea of precaution as an ideal for policy making rather comes out as a dead end. On the basis of these contrasting starting points, Christian Munthe undertakes an innovative, in-depth philosophical analysis of what the idea of a precautionary principle is and should be about. A novel theory of the ethics of imposing risks is developed and used as a foundation for defending the idea of precaution in environmental and technological policy making against its critics, while at the same time avoiding a number of identified flaws. The theory is shown to have far-reaching consequences for areas such as bio-, information- and nuclear technology, and global environmental policy in areas such as climate change. The author argues that, while the price we pay for precaution must not be too high, we have to be prepared to pay it in order to act ethically defensible. A number of practical suggestions for precautionary regulation and policy making are made on the basis of this, and some challenges to basic ethical theory as well as consumerist societies, the global political order and liberal democracy are identified.

ABSTRACT In response to Albrecht et al.’s (J Agric Environ Ethics 26(4):827–845, 2013) discussion on the ethics of assisted migration, we emphasize the issues of risk and scientific uncertainty as an inextricable part of a comprehensive ethical evaluation. Insisting on a separation of risk and ethical considerations, although arguably common in many policy contexts, is at best misguided and at worst damaging.

I argue that riskier killings of innocent people are, other things equal, objectively worse than less risky killings. I ground these views in considerations of disrespect and security. Killing someone more riskily shows greater disrespect for him by more grievously undervaluing his standing and interests, and more seriously undermines his security by exposing a disposition to harm him across all counterfactual scenarios in which the probability of killing an innocent person is that high or less. I argue that the salient probabilities are the agent's sincere, sane, subjective probabilities, and that this thesis is relevant whether your risk-taking pertains to the probability of killing a person or to the probability that the person you kill is not liable to be killed. I then defend the view's relevance to intentional killing; show how it differs from an account of blameworthiness; and explain its significance for all-things-considered justification and justification under uncertainty. Keywords risk – harm – rights – pro tanto wrongfulness

When it comes to assessing the deontic status of acts and policies in the context of risk and uncertainty moral theories are often at a loss. In this paper we hope to show that employing a multi-dimensional consequentialist framework provides ethical guidance for decision-making in complex situations. The paper starts by briefly rehearsing consequentialist responses to the issue of risk as well as their shortcomings. We then go on to present our own proposal based on three dimensions: well-being, fairness and probability. In the last section we apply our approach to a comparison of different climate policy options, including stratospheric solar radiation management.

How does a free press resist state biopower? This article studies the development and dissemination of KANERE Free Press, a refugee-run news source operating in the Kakuma Refugee Camp, that was founded for the purpose of creating " a more open society in refugee camps and to develop a platform for fair public debate on refugee affairs " (from KANERE Vision Statement). The analysis of KANERE and its impact on the political subjectivity of refugees living in Kakuma is framed by Foucault's theory of biopower, the state-sanctioned right to " make live or let die " in its management of human populations. The author demonstrates the force relations between KANERE, its host country of Kenya, and the UNHCR through two ongoing stories covered by KANERE: the broad rejection of the MixMe™ nutritional supplement and the expressed disdain for the camp's World Refugees Day celebration. Using ethnographic and decolonizing methodologies the author privileges the voices and perspectives of the KANERE editors and the Kakuma residents they interviewed in order to provide a ground level view of refugee's lived experiences in Kakuma. As KANERE records refugees' experiences of life in the camp, they construct a narrative community that is simultaneously produced by and resistant to the regulations and control of camp administration and state sovereignty. In doing so KANERE creates a transgressive space that reaches beyond the confines of the camp.

Most discussions of risk are developed in broadly consequentialist terms, focusing on the outcomes of risks as such. This paper will provide an alternative account of risk from a virtue ethical perspective, shifting the focus on the decision to take the risk. Making ethical decisions about risk is, we will argue, not fundamentally about the actual chain of events that the decision sets in process, but about the reasonableness of the decision to take the risk in the first place. A virtue ethical account of risk is needed because the notion of the ‘reasonableness’ of the decision to take the risk is affected by the complexity of the moral status of particular instances of risk-taking and the risk-taker’s responsiveness to these contextual features. The very idea of ‘reasonable risk’ welcomes judgments about the nature of the risk itself, raises questions about complicity, culpability and responsibility, while at its heart, involves a judgement about the justification of risk which unavoidably focuses our attention on the character of the individuals involved in risk making decisions.

Climate change communication is trapped between the norms that govern scientific practice and the need to engage the public. Overcoming this tension requires new societal institutions where the science and politics of climate change can co-exist.

Standard theories of liability say that X is liable to Y only if Y was harmed, only if X caused Y harm, and (usually) only if X was at fault. This article offers a series of criticisms of each of these claims, and use them to construct an alternative theory of liability in which the nature of X's having imposed a risk of harm on Y is central to the question of when X is liable to Y, and for how much. The article ends with some conjectures on ignorance as an excusing condition.

In response to Albrecht et al.’s (J Agric Environ Ethics 26(4):827–845, 2013) discussion on the ethics of assisted migration, we emphasize the issues of risk and scientific uncertainty as an inextricable part of a comprehensive ethical evaluation. Insisting on a separation of risk and ethical considerations, although arguably common in many policy contexts, is at best misguided and at worst damaging.

Michael Otsuka, Alex Voorhoeve and Marc Fleurbaey have challenged the priority view in favour of a theory based on competing claims. The present paper shows how their argument can be used to recast the priority view. All desert claims in distributive justice are comparative. The stronger a party’s claims to a given benefit, the greater is the value of her receiving it. Ceteris paribus, the worse-off have stronger claims on welfare, and benefits to them matter more. This can account for intuitions that at first appear egalitarian, as the analysis of an example of Larry Temkin’s shows. The priority view, properly understood, is desert-adjusted utilitarianism under the assumption that no other claims pertain.

This chapter charts and critically analyses the ethical challenge of assessing how much (and what kind of) evidence is required for the justification of interventions in response antibiotic resistance (ABR), as well as other major public health threats. Our ambition here is to identify and briefly discuss main issues, and point to ways in which these need to be further advanced in future research. This will result in a tentative map of complications, underlying problems and possible challenges. This map illustrates that the ethical challenges in this area are much more complex and profound than is usually acknowledged, leaving no tentatively plausible intervention package free of downsides. This creates potentially overwhelming theoretical conundrums when trying to justify what to do. We therefore end by pointing out two general features of the complexity we find to be of particular importance, and a tentative suggestion for how to create a theoretical basis for further analysis. Acknowledgement

Theories of rights seem well equipped to explain widely accepted claims about the morality of harming. But can they explain popular claims about the morality of imposing risks of harm? Many think not. But a plausible theory of rights can explain those claims if it says we have the right that others not impose risks of harm upon us. That is a good reason to believe we have that right. There are many objections to the claim that we have that right, but none of them are sound. Among the topics covered are: the permissibility of rights infringements, trivial rights infringements, the permissibility of risk impositions, the aggregation of rights, consent, self-defense, punishment, and compensation.

The development of forensic psychiatric risk assessments is discussed from a clinical point of view using the example of Sweden. A central task in forensic psychiatry has traditionally been to identify dangerous, mentally disordered subjects considered to be prone to commit violent acts. Over time, “dangerousness” has been reworded into “risk”. Nevertheless, such assessments have generally been based on the psychiatric factors characterising the individual patient, while group interaction, situational factors, or social and cultural circumstances, such as the availability of alcohol and drugs, have been largely overlooked. That risk assessments have a focused on people with a diagnosis of “mental disorder” and been used as grounds for coercive measures and integrity violations has somehow been accepted as a matter of course in the public and political debate. Even the basic question whether offenders with a mental disorder are really more prone to criminal recidivism than other offenders seems to have been treated light-handedly and dealt with merely by epidemiological comparisons between groups of persons with broad ranges of psychosocial vulnerability and the general population. Legal texts, instructions and guidelines from the authorities in charge are often vague and general, while actors in the judicial system seem to put their trust in psychiatric opinions. The exchange of professional opinions, general public expectations, and judicial decision processes poses a huge risk for misunderstandings based on divergent expectations and uses of terminology.

Daniel Steel’s new book on the precautionary principle illustrates the need to work ahead to fuse perspectives of epistemology and philosophy of science with those of ethics to accomplish progress in the debate on the proper role of precaution in a broad selection of bioethical areas. Steel advances the territory greatly with regard to conceptual clarity and epistemology, but from a bioethics standpoint he is mistaken in discounting the need for ethical underpinnings of a sound theory of the precautionary principle.

This paper responds to the arguments of Marc Fleurbaey and Alex Voorhoeve in “Decide as You Would with Full Information! An Argument against ex ante Pareto” (same volume). According to the ex ante Pareto principle, if an alternative has higher expected utility for every person than every other alternative, then this alternative should be chosen. Fleurbaey and Voorhoeve claim that ex ante Pareto is not just inconsistent with impersonal distributive principles such as telic egalitarianism or prioritarianism; it also violates a broadly contractualist criterion of moral rightness, according to which an action is right if and only if it is justifiable to each person. I argue that Fleurbaey and Voorhoeve’s main argument against ex ante Pareto fails. The Principle of Full Information, on which it is based, is either unsound, or else cannot settle the debate between defenders and opponents of ex ante Pareto. I conclude that while outcome-based moral principles, such as telic egalitarianism or prioritarianism, do indeed militate against ex ante Pareto, there is no objection to this principle from the vantage point of justifiability to each person.

Safety is a concern in almost all branches of engineering. Whereas safety was traditionally introduced by applying safety factors or margins to the calculated maximum load, this approach is increasingly replaced with Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) as a tool for dimensioning safety measures. In this paper, the two approaches are compared in terms of what they aim at and what they can in fact achieve. The outcome of this comparison suggests that the two approaches should be seen as complementary rather than mutually exclusive. PRA is particularly useful for priority-setting and for the effect evaluation of safety measures. However, in most applications, uncertainties prevent PRA from providing an objective probability of failure or value of damage. Safety factors are indispensible for dealing with dangers that cannot be assigned meaningful probabilities.

Following the statement in the United Nations' Rio Declaration of 1992 that countries should apply a “precautionary approach” in policymaking on environmental and technological issues, the notion of a precautionary principle (PP) has gained ground in worldwide policymaking and regulation, thus catching the interest of ethics scholars. Although seldom explained in much detail, and resulting in quite different policy results in different countries and areas (O'Riordan et al. 2001; Sandin 1999; Trouwborst 2002; Zander 2010), PP is generally understood as a norm urging or permitting policymakers to take preventive action in the face of unknown, uncertain, or probable dangers, motivated by the experience of how seemingly valuable and promising practices may lead to seriously adverse consequences in spite of lack of solid evidence to this effect (Sandin 1999). In ethics debate, this idea has been applied not only to matters regarding the large-scale introduction and use of technology (e.g., regarding energy production, transport and communication, nano- or biotechnology, and so on) (see Biotechnology; Nanotechnology, Ethics of) with possible ensuing impact on the natural environment connecting to the notion of sustainability (see Sustainability), but also, for example, to abortion (see Abortion), medical genetics, embryo experimentation (see Embryo Research), the treatment of animals (see Animal Experimentation), terrorism (see Terrorism), and general research ethics (see Research Ethics) (Munthe 2011). Many of these applications advocate strong conclusions in spite of the fact that PP or its normative justification have not been made very clear. At the same time, PP has been the subject of criticism, much of which boils down to three points: lack of clarity, lack of practicality, and/or ethical implausibility. Curiously, these critical points have often been made in conjunction, in spite of the fact that a clear sense of what PP means seems necessary for backing up the other two objections.

Does the norm against harm extend to probable harms and to collective harms? This has been questioned because the harm that someone risks might not materialize, and because a contribution to a collective harm can as such be harmless. Against this, I argue that the norm against harm prohibits an action whenever it is reasonably likely and reasonably clear that the agent can (help) avoid the harm by opting for an alternative course of action. What is reasonable depends on how harmful the outcome is as well as on the burden that not performing the original action imposes on the agent. I go on to compare the causal condition of this ‘prospect account’ to two common alternatives: causal control and causal contribution. Neither of these can accommodate risk in a plausible way. Furthermore, they issue in implausible verdicts when either too few or too many people are disposed to contribute to a collective harm. In contrast, the prospect account limits the risk of contributing to a collective outcome that is not feasible and that of making a contribution that is redundant to morally acceptable levels.

This essay considers how the current compulsion to digital reproduction – the urge to digitize, network, and online previously not-online materials – offers researchers of and within queer circuits the opportunity to defamiliarize and denaturalize our participation in academic systems of exploitation and to reorient our work towards decolonizing research economies, habits, protocols, and relationships. It takes the Cabaret Commons, the authors’ speculative digital archive of and for trans- feminist and queer (TFQ) grassroots performance scenes in Canada, Mexico, and the United States, as its point of departure. The authors frame TFQ performance and party scenes as negotiated intimacies, cultivating ethics of vulnerability and risk, which operate within and as networked intimate publics. Reading across decolonial, queer, feminist, and trans- ethics and methods, this essay revisits the value of ephemerality, of strategic evaporation, non-storage, and forgetting in online research contexts.

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