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Reconsidering Precautionary Attitudes and Sin of Omission for Emerging Technologies: Geoengineering and Gene Drive

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Risks and Regulation of New Technologies

Abstract

Precautionary attitudes including “precautionary principle” are widely accepted in science and technology governance. Their concept can be potentially applied to emerging technologies such as geoengineering and gene drive. However, precautionary and preemptive attitudes may be also obstacles to decision making because they are used by both the advocates and opponents of these new fields. Therefore, when we examine “innovative emerging technologies that will have unquantifiable and unpredictable influences over a wide spatio-temporally range and produce catastrophic irreversible consequences in a worst-case scenario” from the viewpoint of precautionary attitudes, it is necessary to identify the situations and risks that we really want to avoid because the words “precautionary” and “omission” can have different meanings for different stakeholders.

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  1. Kobe City College of Nursing, 3-4 Gakuen-nishi, Nishi-ku, Kobe, 651-2103, Japan

    Atsushi Fujiki

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  1. Atsushi Fujiki
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  1. Graduate School of Humanities, Kobe University, Kobe, Japan

    Tsuyoshi Matsuda

  2. Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Jonathan Wolff

  3. Graduate School of Economics, Kobe University, Kobe, Japan

    Takashi Yanagawa

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Fujiki, A. (2021). Reconsidering Precautionary Attitudes and Sin of Omission for Emerging Technologies: Geoengineering and Gene Drive. In: Matsuda, T., Wolff, J., Yanagawa, T. (eds) Risks and Regulation of New Technologies. Kobe University Monograph Series in Social Science Research. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-8689-7_13

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