The Proactionary Principle

The Precautionary Principle is being increasingly used as a guide to what kind of research we should be encouraging and what we should be discouraging or banning outright. Unfortunately, the Precautionary Principle is deeply flawed.

One popular form of the Precautionary Principle states:

"When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not established scientifically"

An alternative formulation states:

"We should permit no new technology to be developed and no new productive activity to take place unless we can scientifically prove that no harm to health or environment will result"

What's wrong with that? On the face of it, you may think that it's quite reasonable. We need to protect ourselves from the dangers that unbridled technological development can lead to. Think of Global Warming, Chernobyl, Bhopal, The Exxon Valdez, Thalidomide, DDT, The Atom Bomb, The V1 and V2 rockets, Mustard Gas, The Internal Combustion Engine (which has led to mamy more deaths than all the previous items added together), The Gatling Gun, Iron, Bronze, Fire, Sharpened Sticks, Knocking two rocks together. The list is as long as your patience.

This level of protection from technological dangers, however, comes at a price. A ruinous price. You may be surprised at some of the items in the list above, although I don't think anyone needs to point out how dangerous fire can be. And as for knocking two rocks together - well, that's what started the whole thing off. If we'd avoided that mistake, we'd never have developed all the rest. The price, of course, is that we would all be dead. The whole human race would now be extinct.

Naturally, I can't actually prove that, but just think of how long you would survive, stripped naked, not allowed to use any kind of technology, not even sticks or rocks, and dropped in the middle of a forest somewhere in Africa. If we had to compete for survival with the other animals, without any technology, we wouldn't last five minutes. We are so intimately entwined with our technology that we literally cannot survive without it. It is part of what we are. Even speech can be regarded as a type of technology. It's a communication technology that has enabled us to forge cooperative relationships with other members of our species, and has played a big part in our survival and development.

So, while we do need technology, we also want to be protected from the bad consequences of any new technology. We need to ensure (or, rather, scientifically prove) that no harm can come from any new technological developments. Simple.

Except, of course, that such a requirement is literally impossible. How could anyone possibly PROVE that no negative consequences could arise from anything at all, let alone any new scientific or technological development? Yet the precautionary principle is based on this impossible requirement.

What’s wrong with the Precautionary Principle?

The precautionary principle has at least six major weak spots. It serves us badly by:

1. Assuming worst-case scenarios

2. Distracting attention from established threats to health, especially natural risks

3. Assuming that the effects of regulation and restriction are all positive or neutral, never negative

4. Ignoring potential benefits of technology and inherently favouring nature over humanity

5. Illegitimately shifting the burden of proof and unfavourably positioning the proponent of the activity

6. Conflicting with more balanced, common-law approaches to risk and harm.

Imagine if the precautionary principle had been applied throughout history. We would have no safe drinking water (the dangers of Chlorine in the environment still haven't been fully mapped out), no jet aeroplanes (aviation fuel can be nasty stuff, and no-one knows what long-term effects exhaust trails will have on the atmosphere), no cars, lorries or buses (driving around on top of a potential fuel-air bomb is sheer madness), no dry-cell batteries (toxic chemicals), no domestic electricity supply (240 volts AC can kill!), no domestic gas supply for cooking, heating and lighting, no synthetic fabrics, no plastics, no modern agriculture, books or leather goods (all use toxic, or potentially dangerous chemicals). Oh, and did you know that smoke alarms contain a RADIOACTIVE substance?

I will stop there, because this is clearly getting silly. Yet all these silly things are a result of applying the precautionary principle, in it's present form, to developments we have seen in the past.

We clearly need something else, something that does not suffer from the 6 points listed above.

The Proactionary Principle

Max More, of the Extropy Institute, has formulated a set of guidelines called the Proactionary Principle, that addresses not only the safety concerns of the Precautionary Principle, but also its flaws.

Briefly, the principle states that:

"People’s freedom to innovate technologically is highly valuable, even critical, to humanity. This implies several imperatives when restrictive measures are proposed:

  • Assess risks and opportunities according to available science, not popular perception.
  • Account for both the costs of the restrictions themselves, and those of opportunities foregone.
  • Favour measures that are proportionate to the probability and magnitude of impacts, and that have a high expectation value.
  • Protect people’s freedom to experiment, innovate, and progress."

    Looking deeper into the Principle, we arrive at these factors:

    1. People’s freedom to innovate technologically is valuable to humanity. The burden of proof therefore belongs to those who propose restrictive measures. All proposed measures should be closely scrutinized.
    2. Evaluate risk according to available science, not popular perception, and allow for common reasoning biases.
    3. Give precedence to ameliorating known and proven threats to human health and environmental quality over acting against hypothetical risks.
    4. Treat technological risks on the same basis as natural risks; avoid underweighting natural risks and overweighting human-technological risks. Fully account for the benefits of technological advances.
    5. Estimate the lost opportunities of abandoning a technology, and take into account the costs and risks of substituting other credible options, carefully considering widely distributed effects and follow-on effects.
    6. Consider restrictive measures only if the potential impact of an activity has both significant probability and severity. In such cases, if the activity also generates benefits, discount the impacts according to the feasibility of adapting to the adverse effects. If measures to limit technological advance do appear justified, ensure that the extent of those measures is proportionate to the extent of the probable effects.
    7. When choosing among measures to restrict technological innovation, prioritise decision criteria as follows: Give priority to risks to human and other intelligent life over risks to other species; give non-lethal threats to human health priority over threats limited to the environment (within reasonable limits); give priority to immediate threats over distant threats; prefer the measure with the highest expectation value by giving priority to more certain over less certain threats, and to irreversible or persistent impacts over transient impacts.

    The Proactionary Principle seems to be a much more sensible and workable model for protecting individual people, society and the environment from the negative consequences of technological progress, while still enabling us to maintain that progress and reap the benefits of it. The UKTA is in support of the Proactionary Principle, and this project is an ongoing attempt to raise awareness of this alternative to the Precautionary Principle, and encourage people, organisations and governments to make use of it.

    If you have any suggestions or think you could usefully contribute to this effort, please get in touch with the project leader.