Abstract
Environmentalists have advocated the Precautionary Principle (PP) to help guide public and private decisions about the environment. By contrast, industry and its spokesmen have opposed this. There is not one principle, but many that have been recommended for this purpose. Despite the attractiveness of a core idea in all versions of the principle—that decision-makers should take some precautionary steps to ensure that threats of serious and irreversible damage to the environment and public health do not materialize into harm—even one of the most widely endorsed principles needs considerable specification and refinement before it can be used. Moreover, the PP is an approach or guide to utilizing scientific evidence in social or legal decision-making contexts. In this it does not differ in kind from other approaches to using factual information such as in the law. The law provides some models for different strategies to guide decision-making under uncertainty when factual issues cannot be resolved with certainty. These in turn can help guide the formulation of different versions of PP and help clarify some presuppositions of the principle. Once some plausible versions of PP are articulated, I suggest some applications to existing environmental problems.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Raffensperger, C. and Joel Tickner, J. (eds.) (1999) Protecting Public Health and the Environment: Implementing the Precautionary Principle, Island Press, Washington, D.C.: (Appendix B) 356–361.
Cross, F.B. (1996) Paradoxical perils of the precautionary principle, Washington and Lee Law Review 53: 851–925.
Whelan, E.M. (2000) Health: a nation fixated on hypothetical risks, ex femina (May): 4.
United Nations Agenda 21: The United Nations Programme of Action From Rio (1992) The United Nations Publication, New York: 10.
Hickey, J.E. Jr. and Walker, V.R. (1995) Refining the precautionary principle in international environmental law, Virginia Environmental Law Journal 14: 426.
National Research Council (1984) Risk Assessment in the Federal Government: Managing the Process, National Academy Press, Washington, D.C.: 18.
Cranor, C.F. (1999) Asymmetric information, the precautionary principle and burdens of proof in environmental health protections, in: Protecting Public Health and the Environment: Implementing the Precautionary Principle: 74–99.
Turner v. United States 396 U.S. 398 (1970).
Cranor, C.F. (1995) The social benefits of expedited risk assessment, Risk Analysis 15: 353–358.
James, F. Jr., and Hazard, G.C. (1977) Civil Procedure, 2nd Edition, Little, Brown and Company, Boston: 241.
Strong, J.W. (ed.) (1992) McCormick on Evidence, 4th edition, West Publishing Co., St. Paul: 957,962.
Hoover, S.M., Zeise, L., Pease, W.S., Lee I.E., Henning, M.P., Weiss, L.B., and Cranor, C.F. (1995) Improving the regulation of carcinogens by expediting cancer potency estimation. Risk Analysis 15: 267–280.
Food Quality Protection Act of 1996, 7 U.S.C. § 136 (Supp. II, 1997).
Durnil, G. (1999) How much information do we need before exercising precaution? In: Protecting Public Health and the Environment: Implementing the Precautionary Principle, 266–276.
Edwards, F.S., Scott, T.S., and Allen, M. (forthcoming) The rate of species extinctions in the california hotspot: how much time is left?”
Hooper, K. and McDonald, T.A. (2000) The PBDEs: an emerging environmental challenge and another reason for breast-milk monitoring programs, Environmental Health Perspectives 108: 1–7.
Travis, C.C. and Hester, S.T. (1991) Global chemical pollution. Environmental Science & Technology 25: 814–819.
Hirschman, A.O. (1991) The Rhetoric of Reaction. Belknap Press, Cambridge.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Cranor, C.F. Learning from the law to address uncertainty in the precautionary principle. SCI ENG ETHICS 7, 313–326 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-001-0056-0
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-001-0056-0