Precaution, threshold risk and public deliberation
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 mak...
| Main Author: | |
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| Contributors: | |
| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Published: |
[2019]
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| In: |
Bioethics
Year: 2019, Volume: 33, Issue: 2, Pages: 254-260 |
| IxTheo Classification: | NCD Political ethics NCH Medical ethics |
| Further subjects: | B
Ethics
B precautionary regulation B Precautionary Principle B Risk B public deliberation |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (Publisher) Volltext (doi) |
| Summary: | 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. |
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| ISSN: | 1467-8519 |
| Reference: | Kritik von "Policy on Synthetic Biology (2015)"
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| Contains: | Enthalten in: Bioethics
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1111/bioe.12488 |
