Precautionary Principles and Politics

The Guardian blogs on the shortcomings of the precautionary principle and some rather disparaging remarks about the nature of its appeal.

The author is right in that the precautionary principle can easily become a way of simply blocking change, which can be bad if the potential change has positive consequences.  Since big changes usually have both positive and negative consequences, this suggests a rational approach is to weigh up the evidence in a dispassionate manner.

Unfortunately, politics (and many of these decisions are inherently political even when taken by non-politicians) generally doesn't work like that. I thought it would be interesting to think about why not, and here is what I came up with:

1) Simplicity is great for campaigns.  If you are organising a campaign, you need a simple message that people can easily get.  Stop this, is such a message.  Slightly more difficult is: GM foods could be dangerous, so stop them, but that still works pretty well.  The message: here is all the evidence, and a careful examination shows a net disbenefit does not work at all.

2) Elite groups are these days distrusted.  I suppose in the 1950s many people were more inclined to trust various expert or authoritarian groups such as governments, scientists etc. numerous scandals revealing lying, arrogance, incompetence and manipulation in their own self interest have greatly damaged the reputations of such groups.  The whole NSA spying scandal is just the most recent prominent example.  There also seems to have been a change in popular culture to value an image of an heroic outsider taking on authority, although I suspect this is more valued as fiction than in reality.

3) Problems are getting more complex.  Or at least we seem to have more and more information about problems which makes decision making more complex.  It is natural to seek a way to simplify such problems with a crude principle such as the precautionary principle, although I believe it is one example among many.  Another commonly used simplification is ad hominum.  I like and trust  so-and-so, who is on this side of the argument so I will back his argument is another example.  It was noticeable that Dr Wakefield was discredited over MMR not by the scientific arguments, but by allegations of self interest.

4) The Pristine Myth.  This applies to particularly to the field of ecology, that there is a natural or original state that everything should conform to.  In fact we know that everything is always changing in all sorts of ways.  The entire English landscape has been fundamentally shaped by human interaction.  Indeed human beings themselves and various organisms they interact with have shaped each other; just look at the domestic dog.  The argument that the current state of things is natural ignores the way in which things have been changed by mega fauna that no longer exists  _ a central argument for rewilding for example.

5) There is only one right decision.  Finally, there is the idea that the public good unequivocally demands one decision, often the one that coincides with the advocate's own good.  more generally, political decisions are made to distribute resources between different groups with different views and interests, and the decision maker has to balance these different groups rather than just caving in to one.  A rigid application of the "precautionary principle" would presumably benefit those who benefit from the status quo rather than those who would benefit from change.

6) Groups have disproportionate stakes.  A group that loses out particularly may shout much louder than a larger number of people who benefit from change only a small amount.  There is also a paradoxical effect where a small interest group can convince themselves and others that they represent the true public interest, when in fact they represent only a sectional interest (Classically seen with NIMBY groups in planning applications).