We sometimes make choices on behalf of others. If we knew how the options would turn out, making these decisions would require only knowing what’s best for the affected person. But in cases of risk, decisions are more complicated—particularly if we assume that there is a wide range of rational attitudes toward risk. Our ordinary judgements appear to require making risk-averse choices when we don’t know the affected person’s attitude towards risk. But this principle lacks justification and contains a puzzling asymmetry: why is it wrong to expose someone else to a risk without their consent, but permissible to deny them the chance of an equally large benefit? I show that we can justify the principle and explain the asymmetry if we accept a connection between this problem and the problem of interpersonal distribution. I defend this connection against an important worry that has been raised in the literature. The result is an account in which the principles governing distributive ethics and the principles governing other-directed decision-making mutually support each other.

Lara Buchak is a Professor in the Philosophy Department at Princeton University. Her research interests include decision theory, social choice theory, epistemology, ethics, and the philosophy of religion. Her book Risk and Rationality (2013) concerns how an individual ought to take risk into account when making decisions. It vindicates the ordinary decision-maker from the point of view of even ideal rationality. A central implication of her view is that individuals with different attitudes towards risk—considered as different ways to weight worse scenarios against better ones—can all be rational. Subsequent work has applied this framework to ethics, arguing that we ought to defer to individuals’ risk attitudes in biomedical research; that we ought to give substantially greater weight to worse scenarios in setting climate policy; and that we ought to care a great deal about the interests of the worse off when acting ethically. Other areas of research include group decision-making, the nature of faith, and the nature of free will. Buchak received her PhD from Princeton in 2009 and spent 12 years in the Philosophy Department at UC Berkeley before returning to Princeton.