The ethics of hormesis – no fuss?

Abstract

It has been argued that the phenomenon of hormesis should prompt us to revise current regulatory policy in order to take beneficial effects of small doses of various agents into account. I argue that three problems – the comparative smallness of hormetic effects, the fine-tuning problem, and the problem of aggregated actions – should lead us not to overemphasize the importance of hormesis for policy, and that they, if anything, points towards a non-consequentialist approach to the ethics of risk.