In Defence of Bad Science and Irrational Policies: an Alternative Account of the Precautionary Principle
In the first part of the paper, three objections to the precautionary principle are outlined: the principle requires some account of how to balance risks of significant harms; the principle focuses on action and ignores the costs of inaction; and the principle threatens epistemic anarchy. I argue th...
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| 格式: | 电子 文件 |
| 语言: | English |
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| 出版: |
Springer Science + Business Media B. V
2010
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| In: |
Ethical theory and moral practice
Year: 2010, 卷: 13, 发布: 1, Pages: 3-18 |
| Further subjects: | B
Environmental Ethics
B Precautionary Principle B Equity B Risk B Relational conceptions of justice |
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Volltext (JSTOR) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| 总结: | In the first part of the paper, three objections to the precautionary principle are outlined: the principle requires some account of how to balance risks of significant harms; the principle focuses on action and ignores the costs of inaction; and the principle threatens epistemic anarchy. I argue that these objections may overlook two distinctive features of precautionary thought: a suspicion of the value of “full scientific certainty”; and a desire to distinguish environmental doings from allowings. In Section 2, I argue that any simple distinction between environmental doings and allowings is untenable. However, I argue that the appeal of such a distinction can be captured within a relational account of environmental equity. In Section 3 I show how the proposed account of environmental justice can generate a justification for distinctively “precautionary” policy-making. |
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| ISSN: | 1572-8447 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Ethical theory and moral practice
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1007/s10677-009-9169-3 |