Abstract
How is the following claim to be understood and justified? What theoretical presuppositions does it make use of? What are its practical implications? What more precise version of PP can it support?
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Notes
- 1.
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This concerns, for example, a large part of the very problematic issue of how possible future bearers of value (e.g., people with decent qualities of life that might come to exist in the future) should be taken into account. See Parfit (1984, part 4), and Arrhenius (2000), for detailed and provocative treatments of this issue.
- 3.
For example, the Swedish Environmental Protection Act (“miljöbalken”) makes a salient distinction between considerations of human welfare, animal well-being and environmental values. Although one should perhaps not make too much of this, similar more or less clearly stated distinctions can be found in policy documents and laws in many countries around the world.
- 4.
See, for example, Andersson (2007) .
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- 6.
Individual people? Organised groups? Public institutions? Commercial companies? Political regions? Countries? Quasi federative associations? Multinational organisations? All of these? Some of these? Just one?
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Hansson (1997).
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In decision theory , the paradigmatic example of this phenomenon is, of course, the so-called prisoners’ dilemma . Regarding moral philosophy , several parallel cases have been described by Parfit (1984, part 1).
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The same phenomenon is in fact true of any norm or decision rule formulated by decision theorists (such as the principle of maximising expected utility , the maximin principle etc.) and moral philosophers (such as utilitarianism , Kantian deontology , theories of rights etc.).
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See Sandin (2005) for criticism of this type in relation to the particular idea that the de minimis likelihood levels are to be specified on the basis of ‘natural’ risk levels.
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If the consideration of scenarios with a likelihood below a certain degree would make the whole process of deciding what option maximises expected utility suboptimal (from the point of view of this very same principle) compared to acting on chance or some other principle, the decision costs of including these scenarios would be too high and they should therefore be considered to be de minimis risks.
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This suggests an explanation to the observation made by Allhoff (2009) that what is to count as a “catastrophe” in formulations of PP where this word is employed to signal the “great harm” part of the requirement of precaution is of great importance, although poorly understood.
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“[Waiting] for full scientific evidence is exactly what the Precautionary Principle tells us not to do” (Hansson 1999, p. 918).
- 17.
The term was introduced by Hansson (1999) and should not be confused with the notion of evidence. A proof-standard will, of course, have implications for what counts as a piece of evidence, but will also incorporate a basis for evaluating how various pieces of evidence should be assessed in combination, how the argumentative weight of a piece of evidence should be determined, rules for valid reasoning from evidence to conclusion , et cetera.
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- 19.
McKinney and Hamer Hill (2000). In my own experience, this ‘favouring of status quo ’ is a rather common feature of many people’s intuitive and spontaneous interpretations of PP.
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See, for example, Hansson (1989).
- 21.
Hansson (1997).
- 22.
This rule tells us to focus on the avoidance of very bad outcomes and therefore instructs us to choose that option the worst possible outcome of which is at least not worse than the worst possible outcome of every other option open to us. See further the discussion of this rule in Chapter 3 below.
- 23.
See, for instance, Hansson (1997) for an illustration of such an assumption being made.
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Typically the principle of maximising expected utility , explained in Chapter 3.
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- 26.
Or, at least, that the estimates are made by people that are seen as especially reliable with regard to the matter at hand (i.e. experts).
- 27.
The former has been repeatedly suggested by Catholic officials and ethicists in debates on the morality of abortion and embryo research , see, e.g., Ford (1990), and Mahoney (1984, p. 68), but also by proponents of animal rights , see Bradshaw (1998). The latter is the suggestion made by German theologian Hans Jonas ’ so-called imperative of responsibility , see Jonas (1979).
- 28.
The former idea seems to have originated in Nozick (1974, pp. 73–76), and has then been pursued in different ways by commentators such as McCarthy (1997), Shrader-Frechette (1991), Teuber (1990), and Thomson (1986). The latter idea has been pursued by, among others, Perhac (1999), and Schuyt (1998).
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Munthe, C. (2011). Dimensions of Precaution. In: The Price of Precaution and the Ethics of Risk. The International Library of Ethics, Law and Technology, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1330-7_2
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