Some of your choices are primarily guided by the interests of others: for example, which charities to give to or which political policies to vote for. How should you evaluate the options when they involve risk—when you don’t know how the world will turn out? I argue for a tight connection between the problem of making a risky choice for another person and the problem of distributing benefits and burdens across people. This yields a schema for a principle governing risk-taking for others, both when you know a person’s attitude toward risk and when you do not. I detail several ways to fill in this schema, including my preferred view. The result is a unified framework for thinking about what we owe to others in cases of risk.
