The Price of Precaution and the Ethics of Risk

摘要

In The Price of Precaution and the Ethics of Risk, Christian Munthe attempts to identify the normative basis of the requirement of precaution and shed light on how we should determine the appropriate price of precaution in various contexts. From the outset, Munthe acknowledges that the so-called precautionary principle has come to dominate public discussions of environmental policy despite ongoing philosophical debates of the merit, nature, and formulation(s) of it. As Munthe understands it, the (albeit unclear) precautionary principle urges us 'to reflect on the possibility of disaster beforehand and to proceed with caution in the light of such awareness' (p. 1). This principle is also often understood to capture the intuitions 'that it is better to be safe than sorry' and/or 'that we sometimes should act in advance of scientific certainty'. Munthe's project may be understood as an attempt to find and clarify the 'ideal of the desirability of precaution' (p. 6), as well as 'the need for a morality of precaution' (p. 9, original emphasis), which he relates to a theory about 'the moral responsibility of imposing risks' (p. 10, original emphasis). In this way, Munthe de-emphasizes the precautionary principle while focusing instead on a more general notion of precaution.