Responding to Uncertainty

Abstract

There are numerous contexts, beyond disorders of consciousness, where there is a need for decisive action in the presence of unavoidable epistemic uncertainty. The ethics of uncertainty can help. This chapter examines three complex decisional contexts with intersecting, interacting epistemic and ethical uncertainty. The first is pain. Pain, like consciousness, is a subjectively phenomenal experience, the quality and quantity of which are hard to put into words. Pain sufferers encounter testimonial injustice because of the subjectivity, invisibility, and objective uncertainty of pain. The second context is vaccine research and development, and the emergency approval of COVID-19 vaccines under conditions of time pressure and uncertainty. The third context is research with conscious nonhuman animals. There are known, certain risks of harm to the animals, but the benefits of the research are epistemically uncertain. Judging the permissibility of such research requires considering inductive risks, and the principles of inductive risk.