When it comes to ethics and moral responsibility, intent and agency are everything! For ethical purposes, it is similar to injecting a person with a flu virus to test if their acaiberry diet has improved their immunity. Yes, they could, even without your intervention, have caught flu and also spread it to others, but as an agent, you have increased that probability of flu occurring and spreading in the community to close to 100% when it could have been very close to zero.

Similarly, the researchers have increased the probability of a crash from the near-zero probabilities that are typical of actuarial tables to close to 100%.