Draft 4/05/08
Alan Randall
Taking the Precautionary Principle Seriously
– a proposed monograph
A. Rationale
The problem context. The precautionary principle (PP) has been proposed as a guide for public policy in areas where there may be extraordinary risk, uncertainty, and gross ignorance about future consequences. Of course, we already have theory and methods for risk assessment and risk management, but the whole PP movement is founded on the claim that something more, something stronger than ordinary risk management (ORM), is needed.
The PP is fundamentally a claim that, when making multi-dimensional public decisions, acting to avoid and/or mitigate potential harmful consequences should be accorded high priority. It has been invoked in contexts such as medical, pharmaceutical, ecological, and environmental risk; and is a source of controversy in trade and economic development. There are many definitions of the PP in the literature (Clooney 2004). Definitions fall into three main categories, on a weaker-stronger scale:
· Uncertainty about harmful consequences does not justify failure to take precautionary action (Bergen Declaration 1990)
· Plausible but uncertain harm justifies precautionary intervention (UNESCO 2005)
· Uncertain harm requires intervention, and the burden of proof is shifted to the proponent of the proposed risky action (Wingspread Statement)
Governments and international organizations have adopted various versions of the PP. In this, the European Commission (2000) and UNESCO (2005) have been leaders, and they have tended toward the mid-strength definition, and embedded the PP in more fully-articulated decision processes with safeguards to prevent invoking the PP with, among other things, insufficient evidence of threat (“crying wolf”), insufficient attention to likely costs of precautionary actions, and inadequate provision to deal with distributionally-skewed consequences.
Despite its elemental appeal – be careful not to run off the cliff – the PP has proven a lightning rod for controversy in scholarly discourse, public discussion, policy circles, and in regulation and law. To its proponents, PP is just a matter of commonsense: extraordinary risks call for extraordinary precaution (e.g., Seventh Generation, undated). Yet opponents argue that the PP would undermine business-as-usual and stifle innovation and growth (e.g., Bailey 1999, More 2005). Scholarly critique of the PP includes versions of the above popular arguments, along with an array of others. Nevertheless, governments and international institutions have moved ahead to embed the PP in their decision structures in commonsense ways with safeguards of various kinds.
Objectives. This project aims to bring some conceptual clarity to the scholarly discourse, and ultimately to influence public discussion. Scholarly commentary is anchored at one end by claims that the PP is foolish, self-defeating, and ultimately meaningless because it would forbid any and all risky alternatives (Sunstein 2005), and at the other end by surprise that the PP is so controversial because, after all, it is little more than ORM (e.g., Farrow 2004). Yet, a PP to be taken seriously can be neither foolish nor redundant (as it would be, if it were just ordinary risk management). My objectives are to:
· Define and defend a PP that can be taken seriously, and is clearly positioned as a principle, not a rule.
· Address clearly the issues of
o the nature of threats that might invoke a precautionary response (and, in so doing, the related concepts of disproportionate and asymmetric risk, uncertainty, and gross ignorance),
o scientifically credible evidence in an era of persistent attempts to politicize science, and
o the distinction between a principle and a rule.
· Outline a coherent framework for acting on principles in practical governance.
· Review some attempts to implement the PP (e.g., US endangered species legislation, EU attempts to restrict imports of genetically-modified commodities) and some attempts to specify a governance framework for implementing the PP (e.g., EU and UNESCO documents), as a way of “ground-truthing” the framework developed above.
Significance. The PP, while it remains controversial, has been adopted by governments, multi-national organizations, and various global conventions. It has potential application to (1) medicine, pharmacy, and public health (especially, cases involving involuntary exposure and/or exposure without informed consent), and (2) global environmental issues such as climate change, ecosystem health, and scarcity of essential resources. It has become an issue in international trade – witness United States objections to European Union restrictions on importing genetically modified commodities and beef raised with artificial hormones. In unsubtle application, the PP may invite certain disaster for the very poor as the “acceptable” cost of avoiding a more speculative risk (see Turvey and Mojduszka, 2005, on PP-based objections to international food aid in Africa). If this project succeeds in bringing more conceptual clarity and coherence to the design and justification of the PP, this will lead eventually to more appropriate, consistent, and beneficial application in a world fraught with risk, uncertainty and gross ignorance.
B. Outline
1. (a) Introduction and motivation (approximately 16 printed pages)
PP is controversial. The precautionary principle (PP) is fundamentally a claim that, when making multi-dimensional public decisions, acting to avoid and/or mitigate disproportionate risks should be accorded high priority. Despite its elemental appeal – be careful not to run off the cliff – the PP has proven a lightning rod for controversy. Popular commentary is anchored by claims that
· PP offers an idea that seems like ordinary commonsense: Extraordinary risks call for extraordinary precaution.
· PP would undermine business-as-usual and stifle innovation and growth, all in response to excessive pessimism and possibly-irrational fears.
Scholarly critique of the PP includes versions of the above popular arguments, along with an array of others. Here, we highlight –
· The PP is self-defeating and essentially meaningless because it would forbid any and all risky alternatives, yet even the no action alternative involves risk (Sunstein 2005).
· The PP is nothing special – just good science, good risk assessment, and good benefit cost analysis, i.e., ordinary risk management, ORM (Farrow 2004).
· The PP is susceptible to false alarms whereas ORM assigns authority regarding the credibility of threats to the scientific mainstream, where it belongs.
· The PP debate is merely a quarrel about who owns the null hypothesis (“Prove the proposed action is harmful”. “No, you prove it is harmless”).
· There are almost twenty different formulations of the PP in circulation, so how can it be taken seriously in real-world policy?
· The PP conflicts with other important values that good law and policy would surely respect, and it fails to provide clear instructions for resolving these conflicts.
(b) Objectives of this project (~8 pp)
Taking the PP seriously requires that we define and defend a meaningful PP that is neither foolish nor redundant. Such a PP would be …
· Addressed to public policy issues involving collective threats.
· Clearly distinct from ordinary risk management (and therefore not redundant in that sense). It would not exclude ORM but, rather, subsume it in a broader framework that does not balk at stronger remedies when they can be justified.
· Justified for circumstances that would be recognized as extraordinary – a scientifically credible scenario that generates a disproportionate and asymmetric threat – and therefore avoids at least two kinds of foolishness: the imperative to avoid all risks, and susceptibility to false alarms.
· A sharp break from business-as-usual that provides remedies proportionate to the threat, allows time for research and learning, and is revisited in light of new information.
· Clearly positioned as a principle, not a rule (a principle is capable of commanding broad agreement and identifies considerations to be taken seriously, but is not a universal trump that defeats other valid considerations).
… and thus would survive the above challenges.
2. Define a coherent PP (~50 pp)
Some environmentalists have defined PP as invoked by any and all actions that risk harm to nature (Raffenberger and Tichner 1999). At the opposite extreme, some economists (e.g., Farrow 2004) have defined it as (merely) introducing explicit risk aversion into the standard expected welfare maximization calculus. Neither extreme makes sense. Sunstein (2005), among others, has emphasized the foolishness of a PP that is invoked by any and all risks. On the other hand, a PP that goes no further than ORM is not merely redundant; it fails to grapple seriously with the well-recognized weaknesses of ORM in dealing with the problem of unlikely but potentially devastating possibilities.
Getting started
(i) Consider the Hippocratic Oath – above all, do no harm. What can this possibly mean?
· If taken literally, an incision would be impermissible.
· Perhaps it means do no harm in the net – harm from (1) intervention should be less than from (0) letting things take their course – i.e., a Benefit Cost criterion.
· But there is risk in (1) and risk in (0). Perhaps the expected value of harm(1) must be less than the expected value of harm(0); or expected utility(1) should be greater than expected utility(0), an approach that could accommodate risk-aversion within a thoroughly utilitarian framework. These approaches are consistent with ORM.
· Perhaps it calls for an asymmetric calculus – harm (1) should be disproportionately less than the harm(0). Why? Because there is a special duty on the intervener to get things right? [1] Because it is basically unfair if people who trust their government get blind-sided by an authorized treatment (or a regulated food supply) that harms them, even if on average the treatment helps and the food nourishes? Or simply because novel interventions may raise possibilities of harm asymmetrically greater than are likely from letting things take their course?
· Perhaps it is nothing more than an admonition to, before intervening, pause to consider the unintended consequences?
This brief look at the implications of the Hippocratic Oath has served several purposes. It has identified the benefit cost, expected value, and expected utility approaches that constitute ORM; and it has opened the door to two approaches that are outside of the usual range of ORM – a stand stronger than ORM that calls for asymmetric treatment of uncertain but potential asymmetric harm, and a stand weaker than ORM that calls only for sensitivity regarding possible unintended consequences. The Hippocratic Oath discussion here has been framed in terms of one of the two situations where PP might be relevant – the case of a novel and potentially threatening action (a treatment that may turn out to be harmful).
At this point, we have taken the Hippocratic Oath about as far as it can be taken as a metaphor for the PP, because the PP I have in mind applies more readily to collective threats. Precautionary strategies for individuals, and the obligations of public institutions and the professions to protect individuals from unnecessary exposure to threats, are interesting and important problems; but they are not a primary focus here.
(ii) Consider the Ehrlichs’ rivet-popper (who is removing rivets from the wings of the plane you will fly in, because scrap metal is selling well and nothing bad has happened to the plane despite the rivets popped thus far).[2] There is a cost to quitting the popping, and perhaps some ORM involved on that side because the price of scrap metal, and the economic consequences of stopping, may vary. This is a standard criticism of PP – (1) there is risk on both sides of the equation, and (2) PP would paralyze innovation and stunt economic growth, all because we are scaredy-cats. But surely the risk to the plane is at least a candidate for classification as disproportionate and asymmetric[3] relative to the risk to the economy.
The rivet-popper example advances the PP discussion in several ways. It addresses the second of two situations where PP might be relevant – the case of a business-as-usual pattern of exploitation (or pollution) that might overstress natural and/or economic systems, potentially resulting in a novel and threatening outcome (regime shift). It moves the discussion in the direction of collective threats (if the wings fail, all aboard the plane face extreme danger). Let the plane serve as a metaphor for a major ecosystem, or for the planet Earth itself, and we have imagined a realistic and policy-relevant asymmetric and disproportionate threat of the collective kind.
An ETR framework
Let us start with what could be called an ETR framework. A PP of the following form …
If there is evidence stronger than E that an activity raises a threat[4] more serious than T, we should invoke a remedy more potent than R
… would focus on the key issues: what sorts of threats might invoke precaution, what sorts of remedies might be appropriate, and what sorts of evidence might justify a precautionary interruption to business as usual? For my purposes, it is helpful to start with T and R because my project is to define and justify a PP that is, or can be, more potent than ORM. So, I start by asking what kinds of threats would justify remedies stronger than ORM.
T. Threats relevant to a coherent PP are likely to be collective threats (see box, p. 6). Examples might include threats to the ecology and/or environment which affect us all, and threats about which we are not informed – in both cases, we have limited opportunity to choose our level of exposure. [Note that relevant threats concerning health and treatment may be of either or both kinds.] Relevant threats should be disproportionate and asymmetric – ordinary risk management is fine for ordinary risks. Contextual features that increase the likelihood of disproportionate and asymmetric threats include complexity, novelty, and large spatial and/or temporal scale.
Complexity. The resilience of complex systems – (1) their tendency, following perturbations, to return toward their prior trajectory; and/or (2) their capacity to tolerate disturbances while retaining their structure and function – may be undermined by sudden anthropogenic shocks that precipitate regime shifts, or by sustained anthropogenic pressure (e.g., harvest, or effluent inflows) that reduces resilience and increases vulnerability to regime shifts (Holling 2001, Folke et al. 2004). Because regime shifts change the system in unpredictable ways (Folke et al.), the threats introduced may be asymmetric.