Abstract
The Precautionary Principle is a guide to coping with scientific uncertainties in the assessment and management of risks. In recent years, it has moved to the forefront of debates in policy and applied ethics, becoming a key normative tool in policy discussions in such diverse areas as medical and scientific research, health and safety regulation, environmental regulation, product development, international trade, and even judicial review. The principle has attracted critics who claim that it is fundamentally incoherent, too vague to guide policy, and makes demands that are logically and scientifically impossible. In this paper we will answer these criticisms by formulating guidelines for its application that ensure its coherence as a useful normative guide in applied and policy ethics debates. We will also provide analyses of cases that demonstrate how our version of the principle functions in practice.
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Notes
Exactly what must be proven under the reversal of the burden of proof is very much in contention, with critics arguing that proving safety is impossible. One of the aims of this paper is to clarify this issue among others.
The authors of the report do list a number of general disjunctive conditions that include irreversibility of harm, threat to human life and health, inequity to future generations, and disregard for human rights. Arguably, the failure to move beyond general specification is unsurprising: while acknowledging that the application of the principle is sensitive to moral values, the authors, aware of moral pluralism, chose to list ethical norms without relying on any ethical framework. However, it is unclear whether the general criteria can be refined sufficiently for practical application without agreement on substantive ethical principles, which would allow, for example, to determine what kind of irreversible harm is morally unacceptable.
For a general overview and assessment of the criticisms, see Ahteensuu (2007) “Defending the Precautionary Principle Against Three Criticisms.”.
Correctly identifying the Precautionary Principle as epistemic, rational, or moral rule is crucial to the principle’s scope, application, and assessment. Each type of rule has its own set of criteria: the adequacy of epistemic rules is based on their success at leading to true or justified beliefs; the adequacy of moral rules is based on leading to morally good action; and the adequacy of rational rules is based on leading to rational choices. A critic who views the Precautionary Principle as a rational rule might criticise it for leading to irrational trade-offs. A critic who views the principle as an epistemic rule might criticise it for being biased towards type 1 errors, rejecting a true null-hypothesis, and thus failing as an adequate epistemic principle. Of course, if the Precautionary Principle turns out to be a moral rule, whose adequacy must be judged based on whether it leads to morally good action, then these critics and their criticisms simply miss their target. Clearly, the question of how the Precautionary Principle is justified is crucial to its function and assessment, but this question is analytically posterior to the question of whether it is a coherent principle. The present paper deals with making sense of the principle, not with justifying it.
The variability of the formulations is hardly surprising; the principle, originally formulated in the context of environmental debates, had been adapted to many different policy areas. Adaptation to different contexts invariably leads to variation in formulations. Yet, the ease with which the principle had been adapted cannot be explained only by an ever present demand for an effective precedent-based conservative policy tool to shape the social, economic, and political life. At least in part, the responsibility for this falls on the generality and, arguably, vagueness of critical terms in the original formulations.
For Details see “Risk Management guide for Information Technology systems,” National Institute of Standards and Technology Special Publication (Feringa et al. 2002).
One should note that term ‘risk’ does not feature in any of the three discussed definitions of the Precautionary Principle—only the term ‘threat’ is featured. The term ‘risk’ is employed by the critics themselves (Van Asselt et al. 2006).
It is important to note that by scientifically plausible scenario we do not mean scientifically likely scenario. On our view a scenario is scientifically plausible merely if it is scientifically conceivable. A scenario is scientifically conceivable if it fits with the current scientific theory and cannot be ruled out by our current body of scientific knowledge.
To be admissible under the precautionary principle, the hypotheses must be in principle falsifiable. Inevitably, this means that in some cases the advocates of the action in question might not be able to falsify such harm scenarios due to technological, computational, or other limitations.
Resnik is concerned squarely with determining whether the Precautionary Principle is scientific, which he reduces to the question of whether it is rational. Quite apart from what seems to be an error of scope—clearly there are rational principles that are not scientific—the problem with this approach is that the Precautionary Principle is viewed narrowly as a decision procedure within decision analysis. This, however, is presumptive: PP could be en epistemic rule, a rational decision rule, or a moral guide, and its success or failure, correspondingly, would depend on whether it leads to true or justified beliefs, rational choices, or moral action—all of which have distinct sets of criteria. The classification of the principle is relevant because the principle might lead to false positives, or type 1 errors, and, viewing it as an epistemic or rational choice rule, one might be tempted to compensate for this lack of balance by placing additional epistemic constraints on the considered hypotheses. However, balancing type 1 and type 2 errors is sensitive to the gravity of the errors, and the gravity of the error will often depend on the context of the principle’s application. Errors leading to moral consequences will, arguably, have greater weight than the errors leading only to pragmatic consequences. In determining the conditions under which the PP is rational and, therefore, scientific by equivocating between the contexts of a scientist whose errors might lead to lost time, money, and effort and a decision-maker whose errors might lead to losses of human lives, Resnik not only views the principle narrowly as a rational or epistemic rule but also, perhaps unwittingly, injects a value judgement into his definition of scientific plausibility. Not to discriminate between moral and pragmatic contexts is, ultimately, to treat them as equivalent. When the notion of scientific plausibility has the equivalence built in, the scope of the Precautionary Principle is unjustifiably narrowed. If, however, as the UNESCO/COMEST report maintains, the value judgements are the prerogative of the politicians rather than scientists, the coherence of the principle must be established independently of its moral, epistemic, or rational justification, which is the goal we pursue in this paper (for more details, see our forthcoming Justifying the Precautionary Principle, Sect. 2.1 PP as a Rational Choice Rule). In our opinion, the consideration of the principle qua coherent or scientific principle requires nothing more than the scientific conceivability of the harm scenario. Deciding whether the principle’s scope must be further constrained (morally, epistemically, or otherwise) depends on whether the principle is meant to lead us to justified beliefs, moral actions, or rational choices.
In the case of trade protection masquerading as precaution, our analysis is specific. The precautionary measures implied only if a scientifically conceivable threat exists. The motivation for insisting on the investigation of a threat is neither here nor there so long as the threat is genuine and the harm scenario is plausible according to our definition.
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Petrenko, A., McArthur, D. Between Same-Sex Marriages and the Large Hadron Collider : Making Sense of the Precautionary Principle. Sci Eng Ethics 16, 591–610 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-009-9165-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-009-9165-y