 Note that the birth safety case differs from the sort of cases at issue in the philosophical debate about risk and thresholds for acceptance and rejection of hypotheses. In accepting an hypothesis, a person makes a judgement that the risk of being mistaken is sufficiently low (Rudner 1953). When the consequences of being wrong are deemed grave, the threshold for acceptance may be correspondingly high. Thus, in evaluating the epistemic status of an hypothesis in light of the evidence, a person may have to make a value-based judgement. However, in the birth safety case, the judgement comes into play at an earlier stage, well before the decision to accept or reject the hypothesis is to be made. The judgement occurs already in deciding what is to count as a ‘harm’ worth considering for the purposes of this research.