Precaution & Democracy

May 1st, 2008

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In writing this post, I definitely allowed the urge to make a quick’n'dirty jibe override the better angels of my nature. In fact, I did so to the extent that I ended up by placing myself in the same camp as yer standard critics of the precautionary principle (PP). Reason being that by suggesting (with tongue in cheek) the PP had implicitly been adopted by the US Administration as a policy tool after 11/9, I implicitly identified precautionary action as taking place whenever diffuse fears about worst-case scenarios coming true in the near future are used as justification for “preventive” action. The standard objection to the PP concerns the irrationality of the way it allegedly gives more evidential weight to fear than to science, and the way it’s constructed to appeal emotionally to the “common sense” argument that it’s better, mutatis mutandis, to be safe than sorry. This is undoubtedly the kind of “precaution” that is represented by Cheney’s “one percent doctrine”.

On this kind of understanding, the PP is therefore castigated as a blanket injunction against novelty that paralyses innovation (the Furedi gambit). It’s charged with reducing complex situations of choice to bivalent either-ors (no-risk or uncertain risk), as in this article, in which Professor Don Aitkin is quoted comparing the PP with Pascal’s Wager:

Pascal argued that it made good sense to believe in God: if God existed, you could gain an eternity of bliss, and if he didn’t exist, you were no worse off. Alas, Pascal didn’t allow for the possibility that God was in fact Allah, and you had opted for belief in the wrong religion.”

. Or alternatively, it is accused of not assisting in decision making, as the journalist Dan Gardner, who writes on risk issues, argues here: here:

Many people have looked at this situation and decided that some or all pesticides should be banned. The science isn’t settled. And the harm — if it exists — would be severe and irreversible. Surely the precautionary principle applies. But what would happen if some or all pesticides were banned? Crop yields would decline. Fruits and vegetables would become more expensive and people would eat less of them. And since there is considerable evidence that eating fruits and vegetables in sufficient quantities protects against cancer, it is very likely that more people would get cancer. So there are risks on both sides. What does the precautionary principle tell us about resolving a dilemma like that? Nothing.

All three of these objections are entirely wrong, and telling you why should hopefully gain me some absolution for having played fast and loose for the sake of a dig at Mr Cheney.

First, the PP has not to date clogged up the wheels of applied scientific research, despite being adopted by the EU as a central plank of public policy. It tends to be applied in piecemeal fashion in focusing on the regulation of new technologies, and is most often used as a way of refocusing research on questions which have not entered the frame of scientific risk assessments due perhaps to financial and time constraints, or other limiting factors. Its implementation to date reveals a central aspect of its original inspiration, that it would be a countervailing influence which could be called on to temper the pro-risk behaviour of hi-tech producers, and get them to think a little more about what they were trying to do.

Secondly, operating (as it tends to) as a pause in the process by which products come to market, it is designed to allow policy makers to think about the multiple alternative solutions which could be applied to a particular problem, and perhaps choose between alternative technical responses - or expand the terms of the choice to include socio-economic responses alongside new technologies in order to avoid plumping for “magic bullets”. In other words, the PP is not about an illusory choice between no-risk and uncertain risk. Rather, it seeks to balance the economic power of private producers to impose risks on society with the right of society to give informed consent to these risks, through a process of scrutiny which is not limited to the terms of the risk assessments to which the producers choose to submit their products.

Finally, the PP, being simply a demand to halt for a moment and think more widely about the potential effects of a product, does not itself provide a solution to a problem; rather, it invites us to consider whether the “problem” (how we make decisions under uncertainty”) has been adequately posed when it comes to product X. Traditional risk assessment methodologies tend to focus on formality, standardisation and repeatability, with the goal being to come up with universally-applicable algorithms into which data about severity of consequences and expectation values can be fed. However, if we lose the capacity to ask wider questions about just how applicable an off-the-shelf method is in a given case, then we have simply assumed that the problem we want to solve is amenable to the kinds of solutions some of us (i.e. large technology companies) tend to prefer.

The PP is not itself a decision procedure - it’s a caveat that is meant to prevent producers from dictating the pace at which new technologies are put on the market and adopted, thus allowing a broader weighing of benefits and harms, bringing in angles which would otherwise not be represented in the decision to allow a product to be sold.

Now the problems with the PP are many, it’s true. But these have to do with how far the three central motivations behind it that I’ve explored here are not expressed in practice. Given that the PP is, at bottom, a mechanism designed to stimulate the search on the part of government for informed consent to the use of new technologies, it demands ultimately a more democratic oversight over how socially-available knowledge is used in the production of technologies. As oversight, in the EU, is basically down to what the relevant regulatory bodies decide is worthy of notice, we’re therefore hardly significantly better off just because the PP guides EU regulatory policy. The PP is not, for example, available to EU citizens as a means of bringing legal challenges.

Which suggests the inevitable conclusion: a genuinely effective implementation of the PP would ultimately mean democratic control over the means of production and the social purposes for which they’re used.

Happy May Day!