The authors hold that an open discussion on the principles of and approaches to establishing the national standards of acceptable health risks should precede the official introduction of these standards into practice in taking decisions on risk management. They criticize the sociostatistical and socioeconomic concepts of risk acceptability as both amoral and impracticable and propose an approach based on the use of the Russian standards of permissible exposure levels (maximum permissible concentrations in particular) and on the exposure-response relationships established by epidemiological studies for the computation of responses (i.e. risk levels) corresponding to the permissible exposures. In some cases that such standards of an acceptable risk are too strict in existing technological or economic practice may be introduced in a stepwise fashion, but the risks that exceed the acceptable level should be compensated for.