Doing, allowing, and precaution

Environmental Ethics

Volumn 29, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 339-358

  Hourdequin, Marion ^a  

^a University of Colorado College of Nursing   (United States)

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EID: 38749134434     PISSN: 01634275     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/enviroethics200729438     Document Type: Review

References (54)

1. Per Sandin et al., "Five Charges against the Precautionary Principle," Journal of Risk Research 5 (2002): 287-99, review many of these criticisms.
2. Per Sandin distinguishes these two versions of the principle, labeling them as argumentative and prescriptive versions, respectively. See "The Precautionary Principle and the Concept of Precaution," Environmental Values 13 (2004): 470.
3. For a detailed critique of traditional risk assessment on these and other grounds, see Mary O'Brien, Making Better Environmental Decisions: An Alternative to Risk Assessment (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000).
4. Jonathan Wiener, "Precaution in a Multirisk World," in Dennis J. Paustenbach, ed., Human and Ecological Risk Assessement: Theory and Practice (John Wiley and Sons, 2002), p. 1510.
5. San Francisco's statute on the precautionary principle is available at http://www.municode.com/Resources/gateway.asp?pid=14134&sid=5.
6. Frances Howard-Snyder, "Doing vs. Allowing Harm," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/doing/ allowing/#9.
7. Of course, the fact that the doing/allowing distinction informs environmental positions and policies does not show that it should.
8. United Nations, UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, http://unfccc.int/essential_background/convention/background/items/1349.php, Article 2 (emphasis added).
9. "President Discusses Democracy in Iraq with Freedom House," 29 March 2006, The White House, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/03/ 20060329-6.html.
10. "Wingspread Statement on the Precautionary Principle," Science and Environmental Health Network, http://www.sehn.org/wing.html.
11. See John D. Graham and Jonathan B. Wiener, eds., Risk versus Risk: Tradeoffs in Protecting Health and the Environment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995).
12. Jonathan Wiener, personal communication.
13. Careful allocation of risk reduction effort is particularly important if reduction of a given risk involves diminishing marginal returns. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for highlighting this point.
14. See, e.g., Wiener, "Precaution in a Multirisk World." By "strong versions" of the precautionary principle, I mean versions that stress the need for precautionary action in the face of uncertain threats. Wiener suggests that weaker versions, which hold that "uncertainty does not justify inaction" (p. 1514), are relatively innocuous.
15. Jonathan Wiener, personal communication.
16. I rely on the following definition of direct consequentialism: "[W]hether an act is morally right depends only on the consequences of that act itself (as opposed to the consequences of the agent's motive, of a rule or practice that covers other acts of the same kind, and so on)." See Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, "Consequentialism," in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ consequentialism.
17. Unless otherwise specified, when I use consequentialism or consequentialist, I am referring to direct consequentialism, as defined above.
18. Graham and Wiener characterize this issue as the question of "how many ripples in the pool [analysts] should . . . investigate." See their "Confronting Risk Trade-offs," in Graham and Wiener, Risk versus Risk, pp. 1-41.
19. For a discussion of how precaution recommends broader consideration of alternatives than risk assessment, see Mary O'Brien, "Alternatives Assessment: Part of Operationalizing and Institutionalizing the Precautionary Principle," in Carolyn Raffensperger and Joel Tickner, eds. Protecting Public Health and the Environment: Implementing the Precautionary Principle (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1999).
20. See Graham and Wiener, "Confronting Risk Tradeoffs."
21. See, for example, George M. Gray and John D. Graham, "Regulating Pesticides," in Graham and Wiener, Risk versus Risk, pp. 173-92.
22. It is difficult to pinpoint an in-principle difference between risk trade-off analysis and the precautionary principle when both are interpreted as direct consequentialist approaches. Differences of this kind are more likely to be seen in application rather than theory.
23. Even if the dilemma can be answered in this way, it doesn't fully vindicate the precautionary principle. Risk trade-off analysis might still be a better consequentialist approach.
24. See, e.g., Samuel Scheffler, ed., Consequentialism and its Critics (New York: Oxford, 1988).
25. Jonathan Wiener, "Protecting the Global Environment," pp. 193-225, in Graham and Wiener, Risk versus Risk, p. 212.
26. Ibid., p. 197.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., pp. 206-08.
29. Ibid., pp. 222-23.
30. Jonathan Wiener, "Beyond the Balance of Nature," Duke Environmental Law and Policy Forum 7 (1996): 13.
31. Wiener, "Beyond the Balance of Nature," p. 15.
32. Except insofar as discerning the causal pathways leading to climate change is relevant to identifying actions that can maintain climate in an optimal range.
33. Wiener does acknowledge that emphasizing human adaptation may leave ecosystems or nonhuman species at risk, entailing a "risk transfer" that needs to be considered. See his "Protecting the Global Environment," p. 223.
34. See United Kingdom Interdepartmental Liaison Group on Risk Assessment, "The Precautionary Principle: Policy and Application," http://www.hse.gov.uk/aboutus/meetings/ilgra/pppa.htm (emphasis added).
35. Insofar as inaction is viewed as a proposed human activity that creates risk, a government's failure to protect people from natural hazards could fall within the ambit of the precautionary principle. However, this is not typically how the version of the precautionary principle considered here is understood and applied, and queries of Academic Search Premier for "precautionary principle AND natural hazards," "precautionary principle AND flood" and "precautionary principle AND earthquake" turned up no results.
36. This case is a complex one: the prevalence of malaria itself may be significantly influenced by human activities. Recent research suggests that malarial mosquitoes may thrive in deforested and human-disturbed areas. See, e.g., Jonathan A. Patz et al., "Unhealthy Landscapes: Policy Recommendations on Land Use Change and Infectious Disease Emergence," Environmental Health Perspectives 112 (July 2004): 1092-98.
37. Joel Tickner, Carolyn Raffensperger, and Nancy Myers, The Precautionary Principle in Action: A Handbook (Science and Environmental Health Network, 1998), http://www.sehn.org/rtfdocs/handbook-rtf.rtf (emphases added).
38. Michael R. Reich, "The Global Drug Gap," Science 287 (2000): 1979-81.
39. "Furor on Memo at World Bank," New York Times, 7 February 1992. The memo notoriously notes: "A given amount of health-impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages."
40. Here one might object that I am using common moral intuitions as the basis for normative claims; yet, these intutions may be wrong. I accede this point. However, insofar as there are some widely held and reflectively endorsed intuitions that the precautionary principle can account for better than a direct consequentialist approach, this may be taken as a point in its favor.
41. Direct consequentialists would, of course, deny that this is a virtue, holding instead that our everyday thinking about fairness is misguided.
42. By taking a holistic approach to risk, risk trade-off analysis, too, may take into account fairness issues more thoroughly than traditional risk assessment (though not in exactly the same way as the precautionary principle). As Jonathan Wiener (personal communication) notes, risk trade-off analysis "can be protective of fairness, by ensuring consideration of impacts on all groups, including groups with little political voice." This concern for transparency and consideration of impacts on all groups is also stressed in the concluding passages of the Wingspread statement.
43. Samuel Scheffler, "Doing and Allowing," Ethics 114 (2004): 216.
44. Ibid., p. 228.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid.
47. T. J. Crowley and G.R. North, "Abrupt Climate Change and Extinction Events in Earth History," Science 240 (1988): 996-1002.
48. Tickner, Raffensperger, and Myers, The Precautionary Principle in Action.
49. Daniel Botkin, Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology of the Twenty-First Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
50. Ibid.
51. Allen Buchanan et al., From Chance to Choice: Genetics and Justice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
52. See Peter Vitousek, "Beyond Global Warming: Ecology and Global Change," Ecology 75 (1994): 1861-76, for detailed discussion.
53. Contra Jonathan Wiener, who argues that to insist that contemporary, human-caused species extinction rates are morally worse than similar rates of extinction at the Cretaceous-Tertiary Boundary is "to ignore the teaching of Darwinian evolution that humans are just as much a product of nature as any other organism." See his "Law and the New Ecology: Evolution, Categories, and Consequences," Ecology Law Quarterly 22 (1995): 351.
54. For a discussion of the value of wildness, see Ned Hettinger and Bill Throop, "Refocusing Ecocentrism: De-emphasizing Stability and Defending Wildness," Environmental Ethics 21 (1999): 3-21.