Dick Cheney and the Precautionary Principle

April 10th, 2008

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The USA has officially been highly resistant to the use of the precautionary principle, unlike the European Union, in regulating technologies like GM. The differences in approach have had serious consequences – they led to the WTO identifying precaution with protectionism, for example, and mean that the US gets to dump largely untested technologies on world markets with impunity.

Explanations for the difference generally descend to the level of ropey cultural psychoanalysis quite rapidly: frontier culture of innovation versus sclerotic mire of Old Europe, etc. etc. But as Jeremy Waldron points out, the precautionary principle has actually been at the heart of American politics since Dick Cheney first became president back in 2000. Cheney’s ‘One Percent Doctrine’ (the subject of Ron Suskind’s book of the same name) – the idea that, if a sufficiently serious threat to US security could be judged a real possibility, no matter how remote, then it deserved the full attention of the security and military apparatus – represents the most serious attempt so far to make the precautionary principle into a policy tool.

Ticking bomb cases are mostly imaginary – hypothetical cases in a law-school classroom or fantasies on TV – and the scenarios they imagine are open to criticism on all sorts of grounds, not least the fanciful assumption that we could know in advance (without the omniscience of television or classroom simulation) that a nuclear device has been planted, that this man knows where it is and that we can get to the device in time if only he can be induced to talk. How likely is all of that? With Cheney’s doctrine, it doesn’t matter. If our knowing that this device exists and that this man knew its location would justify torture, then for the purposes of response, not analysis, the smallest significant probability that this device exists and this man is aware of its location is to be treated as tantamount to certainty.

The futurological intoxication that accompanied Cheney’s principle led on to a spectacular expansion of methods of divination, the best of which deserve to be ranked alongside the likes of hepatascopy:

In The One Per Cent Doctrine, Suskind introduces us to steganography. After al-Qaida became aware that US computers were scrutinising the billions of international emails, phone calls and wire transfers in the world for words and phrases like Osama, blow up, or a thousand virgins in paradise, they started embedding information about their plots in numerical matrices hidden in other messages (in the pixels of an electronically transmitted photograph, for example). They would use these means to pass on the geographical co-ordinates of the Statue of Liberty, for example, or Grand Central Station, and steganographers were able to extract it. Or so the US anti-terrorist authorities suspected. Improbable, perhaps, but on the One Per Cent Doctrine, we don’t waste time with probabilities. If it’s possible, we act on it.

Next to this, being prudential in deciding what untested food additives should go to market looks decidedly low-key. The point about this kind of employment of the precautionary principle is that it tends to lead us down all kinds of blind alleys – mere possibilities become a guide to action, and a lot of money, goodwill and time-honoured Western values get poured down the drain.

Cass Sunstein, whose book (Worst Case Scenarios) Waldron is actually reviewing, has recently paid a lot of attention to the drawbacks of precaution, treating it as a principle based on irrational over-estimations of likely harm based on worst-possible outcomes. Precaution, for Sunstein and other critics, cashes out as a fear-based response to the uncertainties of the future, and represents a general threat to human happiness against which we can inoculate ourselves with a stiff dose of strict cost-benefit analysis. Of course, as Waldron points out, this remedy risks creating a new illness:

In Worst-Case Scenarios, the scolding tone becomes more unpleasant when Sunstein confronts the critics of the US refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, aimed at reducing carbon emissions. Many of the critics, he says, come from countries where the likely effects of climate change will be very grave and where the costs of subscribing to the Kyoto carbon caps are quite low. The reverse is true in the United States: the costs (in terms of jobs and probably lives) of lowering the very significant level of carbon emissions is unacceptably high, and the bad effects of climate change will not be felt in the US so much as in other parts of the world. So Sunstein devotes a long second chapter to a defence of the American position. He acknowledges that it’s a self-interested calculation: only costs, benefits and catastrophes for Americans are considered.

As Waldron states, the problem here is one of justice – connected, we might add, to an analysis of need. One reading of calls for precaution is that the established methods for assessing ‘objective’ risk (and the utilitarian models of preference they rest on) often act as covers for forms of injustice. If, for example, a risk is identified, then it is still embedded in social relationships: it is borne by some and not by others. Further, deciding what risks to look for itself implicates problems of justice.

Calling for precaution with respect to a particular possible hazard is not therefore necessarily irrational; rather, it can reflect reasoning about how dimensions of uncertainty not directly acknowledged at the level of official risk assessments should be brought into view in making decisions. Further, it is not necessarily motivated by fear alone, but rather by a desire to preserve and sustain an existing state of affairs or set of relationships, or at least by a particular vision of what human welfare consists in. Perhaps Cheney’s adoption of precaution arguably fits in here. Perhaps he’s not motivated by fear at all, but rather simply by partiality towards a fossil-fuel dependent future. If that’s the case, then the question of whether his interpretation of the counsels of prudence is just or not is the only one worth asking. This, however, is precisely the kind of question that most critics of the precautionary principle can never get around to asking.

(Via Crooked Timber)