Risk, Death, and Well-Being : The Ethical Foundations of Fatality Risk Regulation

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. A wide range of governmental policies characteristic of the modern state seek to reduce individuals' fatality risks--risks that arise from air and water pollution, pathogens, food ingredients and contaminants, motor vehicles, infrastructure, radiation, workplace accidents, alcohol and recreational drugs, firearms, consumer products, tobacco, natural disasters, and other sources.Risk, Death, and Well-Being provides a rigorous treatment of the ethics of fatality risk regulation.It does so through the lens of welfare-consequentialism--specifically, lifetime welfarism, with a particular focus on utilitarianism and prioritarianism.The ethical ranking of possible worlds depends on the patterns of lifetime well-being in the worlds.Premature death is ethically signific