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.
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