Ethical Problems of Precautionarity
by: Christian Munthe
Paper presented at the 1997 Annual Meeting of the Society for Risk Analysis Europe, Stockholm, June 15-18, 1997
Abstract
In recent years a principle for responsible risk-taking called
"The Precautionarity Principle" (PP) has been put forward in
several policy documents regarding risk-management of technological and
environmental issues. PP involves two claims: 1. An ethical claim according
to which it is irresponsible to, for example, use new technologies, regdless
of how large benefits these are known to bring, unless it has been proven
that they will not give rise to unacceptable long term risks. 2. An administrative/political
claim according to which the burden of supplying the proof spoken of in
claim 1 is to be laid on the supplier of the new technology. This paper
deals only with claim 1, which is the real "precautionarity claim".
PP has produced much enthusiasm in different political circles, where it
is often held out as a landmark for a new thinking in risk-management.
However, while claim 2 is clear enough, it is rather obscure how the precautionarity
claim is to be understood. In particular, it is not clear to what extent
(if any) this claim implies anything new for risk-analysis. This is so
since the precautionarity claim does not say anything about what is to
be counted as a proof, or what constitutes an unacceptable risk.
The paper
explores different conlicting interpretations of the precautionarity claim
and demonstrates how the choice between these actualise hard ethical issues.
In particular, the issue of how much damage we are allowed to cause in
order to pursue safety and certainty is discussed. This issue is actualized
when new technologies with known beneficiary effects cannot be proven to
be "safe enough" according to some interpretations of the precautionarity
claim unless investigated for a rather long period of time, during which
the technology is not allowed to be used to produce the beneficiary effects
it can produce. This problem is structurally similar to a well known issue
in medical ethics regarding the rsponsibility of continuing a controlled
clinical trial of a drug known to cure when this means that half of the
patients suffers extra agony and earlier death because they get a placebo
instead of the new drug. The discussion therefore draws on some analogies
between the discussion of this question in medical ethics and the question
of precautionarity in risk-management and risk-analysis in general.
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