Risk and radical uncertainty in HIV research
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87.full.pdf
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280.1 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
7787b4f9e09482eb5cb2ce02781c8ec8
Author(s)
Hare, Caspar
Date Issued
September 2016
Journal
Journal of Medical Ethics
Publisher
BMJ Publishing Group
Citation
Hare, Caspar. “Risk and Radical Uncertainty in HIV Research.” Journal of Medical Ethics 43, 2 (September 2016): 87–89
Version
Final published version
Abstract
How much risk can we expose our research subjects to? There is a special challenge answering this question when the evidence on which we base our assessments of risk is fragmentary, conflicting or sparse. Such evidence does not support precise assignments of risk (eg, there is a 24.8% chance that this patient will develop AIDS in the next year if she participates in my study). At best it supports imprecise assignments of risk (eg, there is between a 5% and 35% chance that this patient will develop AIDS in the next year if she participates in my study). Here I discuss three approaches to evaluating risk when probability assignments are imprecise-an optimistic approach, a moderate approach and a pessimistic approach. I offer a practical reason to favour the pessimistic approach.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1136/MEDETHICS-2015-103117
