The Ethics of Uncertainty

The ethics of uncertainty is an approach to ethical decision-making under conditions of uncertainty. Two legal cases involving patients in the minimally conscious state—Robert Wendland, and a U.K. patient known as M—illustrate the difficulty and complexity of making decisions when so much is unknown about the experiences and minds of these patients. The ethics of uncertainty refocuses ethical enquiry concerning patients with disorders of consciousness, placing less emphasis on their contested personhood and more on inductive risk, on respect for autonomy, and on justice, especially epistemic justice, and the duties of privileged epistemic agents like physicians and medical staff. It encourages an expansive All Things Considered approach to ethical decision-making where the goal is not to arrive at clean, consistent, abstract, ideal decisions for an ideal world, but to enable decision makers facing complexity and uncertainty to fulfill their duties as moral and epistemic agents.