Criticisms Of The Precautionary Principle

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Introduction The precautionary principle (PP) has emerged as an important policy-making tool for the health and environmental regulation. Behind the name lies the simple idea that it is “better to be safe than sorry”. The principle is enshrined in various international agreements and conventions, from the Convention on Biodiversity to the UN Framework on Climate Change. The principle has also become a cornerstone of EU environmental law, and the basis for the regulation of chemicals across the European market. The rise of the precautionary principle has been greeted with a good dose of criticism, however. In particular, critics have argued that the precautionary principle is vague and incoherent, and therefore, a dangerous basis for environmental and health regulation. In this short paper I examine these common criticisms of the precautionary principle. In particular, I consider whether these criticisms are strong enough to warrant the abandon the precautionary principle as a regulatory tool for health and environmental policy. Is the precautionary principle vague and ill-defined? I admit that it would be difficult to claim that the PP is not vague and currently ill-defined. Indeed, there exists many different formulations of the PP, “both in …show more content…

The main point here is that achieving zero risks is impossible and therefore the reasoning behind precautionary decision-making is problematic because it requires that the PP be applied to the very measures that it prescribes, since it is impossible to exclude the possibility that these measures will not have health and environmental consequences of their own. Consequently, the precautionary action prescribed by the PP should be taken and rejected at the same time. This argument can be found in a short passage from Cass Sunstein’s book on the precautionary principle, which is worth quoting at

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