TY - JOUR

T1 - Precaution, threshold risk and public deliberation

AU - Holm, Sune

PY - 2019

Y1 - 2019

N2 - It has been argued that the precautionary principle is incoherent and thus useless as a guide for regulatory policy. In a recent paper in Bioethics, Wareham and Nardini propose a response to the ‘precautionary paradox’ according to which the precautionary principle's usefulness for decision making in policy and regulation contexts can be justified by appeal to a probability threshold discriminating between negligible and non-negligible risks. It would be of great significance to debates about risk and precaution if there were a sound method for determining a minimum probability threshold of negligible risk. This is what Wareham and Nardini aim to do. The novelty of their approach is that they suggest that such a threshold should be determined by a method of public deliberation. In this article I discuss the merits of Wareham and Nardini’s public deliberation method for determining thresholds. I raise an epistemic worry about the public deliberation method they suggest, and argue that their proposal is inadequate due to a hidden assumption that the acceptability of a risk can be completely analysed in terms of its probability.

AB - It has been argued that the precautionary principle is incoherent and thus useless as a guide for regulatory policy. In a recent paper in Bioethics, Wareham and Nardini propose a response to the ‘precautionary paradox’ according to which the precautionary principle's usefulness for decision making in policy and regulation contexts can be justified by appeal to a probability threshold discriminating between negligible and non-negligible risks. It would be of great significance to debates about risk and precaution if there were a sound method for determining a minimum probability threshold of negligible risk. This is what Wareham and Nardini aim to do. The novelty of their approach is that they suggest that such a threshold should be determined by a method of public deliberation. In this article I discuss the merits of Wareham and Nardini’s public deliberation method for determining thresholds. I raise an epistemic worry about the public deliberation method they suggest, and argue that their proposal is inadequate due to a hidden assumption that the acceptability of a risk can be completely analysed in terms of its probability.

KW - ethics

KW - precautionary principle

KW - precautionary regulation

KW - public deliberation

KW - risk

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85052634758&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1111/bioe.12488

DO - 10.1111/bioe.12488

M3 - Journal article

C2 - 30125957

AN - SCOPUS:85052634758

VL - 33/2

SP - 254

EP - 260

JO - Bioethics

JF - Bioethics

SN - 0269-9702

ER -