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On the Epistemology of the Precautionary Principle

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Abstract

In this paper we present two distinctly epistemological puzzles that arise for one who aspires to defend some plausible version of the precautionary principle. The first puzzle involves an application of contextualism in epistemology; and the second puzzle concerns the task of defending a plausible version of the precautionary principle that would not be invalidated by de minimis.

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Notes

  1. The formulation in the Rio Declaration states: “Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.”

  2. See Bodansky (1992).

  3. See Nollkaemper (1996).

  4. See Peterson (2006).

  5. See Charnley (1999).

  6. See Gray and Brewers (1996).

  7. See Gray and Brewers (1996) and Resnik (2003).

  8. See Sandin et al. (2002) for a defense of the precautionary principle against five of these charges.

  9. Thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing this point.

  10. See Aven (2011) and Munthe (2011). See also Manson (2002), Bodansky (1992) and Peterson (2006).

  11. For discussions of different ways of interpreting the precautionary principle, see Aven (2011) and Munthe (2011). See also Harris and Holm (1999), Sandin (1999) and the San Francisco Precaution Ordinance, (2002). An example of the precautionary principle presented, albeit unhelpfully vaguely, as a decision rule is found in article 191 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (EU); this treaty describes the principle as “enabling rapid response in the face of a possible danger to human, animal or plant health, or to protect the environment. In particular, where scientific data do not permit a complete evaluation of the risk, recourse to this principle may, for example, be used to stop distribution or order withdrawal from the market of products likely to be hazardous.” See also, for instance, the 2002 UK-ILGRA statement of the precautionary principle, the Wingspread Statement on the Precautionary Principle and the (1998) Vancouver Statement on the Globalization and the Industrialization of Agriculture.

  12. See, for instance, Morris (2000) and Peterson (2006).

  13. For instance, the Science and Environmental Health Network, in response to the critique that the principle is ill defined, remarks (as Montague (2008) puts it, that) “in all formulations of the precautionary principle, we find three elements”, where these elements are the damage, epistemological and remedy elements that correspond with Manson (2002) and Peterson (2006).

  14. For a table representing different versions of the principle, as functions of the different ways of interpreting the damage, epistemological and remedy concepts, see Manson (2002: 267). For a further presentation of different versions of the precautionary principle, see Morris (Op. Cit.) "Defining the Precautionary Principle" in Morris, ed. Rethinking Risk and the Precautionary Principle (Woburn, Mass: Butterworth-Heinemann 2000).

  15. White Paper: “This Common Inheritance: Britain’s Environmental Strategy”, HM Govt, 1990, our emph.

  16. This proposition of course could of course be adjusted so that it is qualified—for example, “There’s a .9 likelihood that methyltrexate will lower the immune system of a given human.” The point here is that, as stated, that proposition “Methyltrexate causes a lowering of the immune system” is unqualified.

  17. This point has a venerable tradition in Bayesian epistemology.

  18. Our emphasis. See the full 2002 UK-ILGRA document here: http://www.hse.gov.uk/aboutus/meetings/committees/ilgra/pppa.pdf.

  19. Again, this is because, within the propositional content that is the object of the epistemic state, we have operators in whose scope is the causal connection. While the operator will rarely be a necessity operator, it will in many cases be a probability operator, or some type of non-probabilistic operator that nonetheless captures the agent’s confidence about the causal connection. For example, one can have good evidence that activity A is likely to bring about damage D. One might also know that A tends to bring about D.

  20. The most common line of contextualistm is attributor contextualism (e.g. DeRose 1992; Cohen 2004) according to which the relevant standards are those of the attributor.

  21. As DeRose (1999) puts it, “the truth-conditions of knowledge ascribing and knowledge denying sentences (sentences of the form “S knows that P” and “S doesn’t know that P” and related variants of such sentences) vary in certain ways according to the contexts in which they are uttered”. What so varies is the epistemic standards that S must meet (or, in the case of a denial of knowledge, fail to meet) in order for such a statement to be true. (DeRose 1999: 187).

  22. According to a rival position that aims to preserve a similar insight—that standards for knowing vary across context—what fixes the standards are the practical interests of the subject, as opposed to the ascriber of the epistemic state. This position is called subject-sensitive invariantism, and has been defended by (among others) Stanley (2005) and Hawthorne (2004).

  23. Cf. Classical invariantism vis-a-vis knowledge attributions, according to which, as Black (2005) puts it “the truth conditions of knowledge attributions depend neither on the subject’s context nor on the attributor’s context.”

  24. An actual, and much more extreme case occurred in Texas in 2012; a $15 million dollar highway construction project was put on hold for several weeks because the believed-to-be-extinct Braken Bat Cave meshweaver spider was spotted on the construction site. Environmentalists (whose interests were heeded) and construction workers differed profoundly on the significance of the potential damage which would be the spider’s extinction. http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/trending-now/endangered-spider-halts-construction-15-million-texas-highway-174932636.html.

  25. The analogue of such a rule, in the epistemology literature—where contextualism about knowledge is what’s at issue—is a rule staying whose interests determine whether one knows, in a context. Here, attributor contextualists say that the relevant interests that fix the standards are the interests of the attributor; the subject-sensitive invariantist claims it is always the subject’s interests—the subject to whom the epistemic state is being attributed. Whereas the generation of such a rule in the debate about contextualism about knowledge just amounts to allowing for different theory choices, the generation of such a rule, for one who proposes a contextualist treatment of the precautionary principle, would involve a rule that would appear to be an unfair kind of favouring.

  26. As we’ll see in §4, if the standards are too low, a conflict with de minimis emerges.

  27. Suppose the issue is developing a project that poses some threat to the environment. It is in the developer’s interest to downplay severity of damage, regardless of the actual damage expected; likewise, it is in the environmental agency’s advantage to prevent development even if actual expected damage is low. Plausibly, the mean of these standards will be fixed across cases where the degree of actual expected damage varies.

  28. The claim that a reasonable version of the precautionary principle has to be combined with the de minimis principle is defended by e.g. Peterson (2002), Sandin (2004: 21), Clarke (2005), Steele (2006), Ashford (2007), and Zander (2010: 72).

  29. Munthe (2011: 24). Note that Munthe then goes on to formulate a general objcetion to the de minimis principle, which we shall not discuss here.

  30. Whipple (1987).

  31. See Whipple (1987) and Peterson (2002).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Section for Philosophy and Ethics, Eindhoven University of Technology, P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    J. Adam Carter & Martin Peterson

  2. Eidyn Research Centre, School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Dugald Stewart Building (Rm 5.04), 3 Charles Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9AD, Scotland, UK

    J. Adam Carter

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Adam Carter, J., Peterson, M. On the Epistemology of the Precautionary Principle. Erkenn 80, 1–13 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-014-9609-x

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