Today’s dominant theories of risk offer decision-making guidance based on probabilistic reasoning. While extremely powerful in some domains, such theories offer little guidance for frontline care workers who make decisions about risk in an environment where the relevant probabilities are either unknown or too small to be useful. Unfortunately, this mismatch between the theory of risk and the practice of care is often overlooked, and institutions demand that care workers “manage risks” as if they were in a position to accurately forecast future outcomes. This creates practical and ethical problems on both sides of the care relationship. Care workers labor under near-constant anxiety due to unrealistic expectations about their ability to prevent negative outcomes; and service users frequently have their liberty curtailed in the name of risk, especially persons with disabilities who lack the ability to make decisions for themselves and/or the power to communicate those preferences forcefully. This project aims to mitigate these problems by highlighting this mismatch between theory and practice and developing a new approach to risk tailored to the needs of care workers. To develop this new approach, the project will bring the discourse of risk back in touch with the human condition by articulating a broad concept of risk as a fundamental aspect of life as an embodied, mortal, and social agent. With this broad concept in hand, I will then engage in collaborative work with care professionals to tailor this humanistic concept of risk to the realities of the care setting. The project will be intrinsically interdisciplinary from start to finish. It will draw on research from decision theory, philosophy, bioethics, the cognitive sciences, sociology, mental capacity law, and disability studies. And its methodology will reflect this interdisciplinary character.