Threshold Ethics. Modern Philosophy

Threshold Ethics is a pragmatic moral framework for decision-making in emergencies-situations where all available options cause harm, delay worsens outcomes, and power concentrates rapidly. Rejecting rule absolutism, outcome-maximization, and virtue-based ethics as insufficient for modern governance, the book introduces a threshold-based approach that permits exceptional actions only under explicit, enforceable constraints.
Moral violations, when unavoidable, are treated as failures to be governed-not successes to be celebrated. Using decision trees, governance instruments, and comparative failure analysis, the book examines historical cases and contemporary domains including artificial intelligence alignment, biosecurity and dual-use research, autonomous weapons, and emergency state powers. Threshold Ethics does not promise moral clarity.
It insists on accountability, restraint, and the preservation of moral residue when clarity is impossible.