Hybrid | No Harm, No Foul…No Remedy?

Speaker: Dr Kritika Maheshwari, Assistant Professor (TU Delft, Netherlands)

Chair: George Letsas, Professor of Philosophy of Law (UCL Laws)

About the Seminar:

Agents who wrongfully harm others incur corrective duties to compensate their victims. But what about those who wrongfully impose serious risks that never materialize? Pure risk cases challenge standard approaches that link compensatory duties to realized harm. Theorists have responded by arguing either that pure risks trigger no compensatory duties at all, or only non-compensatory duties to provide equivalent protection against future harms. This paper disputes both positions by focusing on the distinctive wrongs of pure risk imposition. I argue that pure risking constitutes a genuine moral wrong that alters the victim's status, expectations, and security in ways that are neither trivial nor remediable through prospective protections alone. Building on leading accounts of what makes pure risking wrongful, I advance a pluralistic framework according to which pure risks trigger duties of compensation, not merely prevention. The crucial question, then, is not whether corrective responses are warranted absent materialized harm, but which responses are appropriate and what institutional innovations our legal systems require to accommodate them.

About the Speaker:

Dr. Kritika Maheshwari is an Assistant Professor at TU Delft (Netherlands), working at the intersection of moral, political, and legal philosophy. She was previously a visiting research fellow at Rutgers Institute for Law and Philosophy. Her current projects explore the relationship between risks, wrongs, and compensation, the ethics and politics of automated decision-making in legal contexts, and the ethics of academia. She is also the ambassador for the Netherlands Chapter of SAFI (Societas Aperta Feminarum in Iuris Theoria). You can read more about her work here.

Photo by Luis Villasmil on Unsplash