quote:

---

It's not possible to argue that the precautionary principle only makes sense when applied to nice environmental issues and not to nasty military ones. But it is possible to argue that it doesn't make sense in either case. Indeed, this is what its application to the war in Iraq brings out - how can something be called precautionary if it involves a readiness to throw away lives on a supposition? As Cass Sunstein recently pointed out in his Seeley Lectures in Cambridge, the precautionary principle is flawed however it is used - whether the issue is the environment, food safety, terrorism or war - because it is self-contradictory: it can always be used to argue both that we should be more careful and that we should not be too careful. Blair captured this double standard perfectly in his Sedgefield speech. 'This is not a time to err on the side of caution,' he said, 'not a time to weigh the risks to an infinite balance; not a time for the cynicism of the worldly wise who favour playing it long.' And yet his speech also argues exactly the opposite - that what matters is taking precautions against future disaster, seeing the big picture, weighing the overall balance of risks. In the very next paragraph, he remarks: 'It is monstrously premature to think that the threat has passed. The risk remains in the balance here and abroad.' This, then, is not a time to err on the side of caution and not a time to err on the side of incaution. Such an argument can be used to justify anything.

The trouble with the precautionary principle is that it purports to be a way of evaluating risk, yet it insists that some risks are simply not worth weighing in the balance. This could only make sense if it were true that some risks are simply off the scale of our everyday experience of danger. Presumably, this is what Blair was getting at when he said that global terrorism posed an 'existential' threat. But existential is a slippery word, in politics as well as philosophy. If global terrorism posed a threat to the existence of all human life on earth, in the way that a ten-mile-wide asteroid heading towards us would, then it might make sense to place it in a different category from all other risks, even if the chances of disaster were relatively slight. But it's extremely implausible that it does pose a threat of this kind, or at least that it poses any more of a threat than all sorts of other things, including a war between states that are permitted to hold onto their large nuclear stockpiles. If terrorism poses an existential threat, it is not to our existence, but to our way of existence: it threatens our prosperity, our security, our ability to live as we choose, our peace of mind. But while all this is true, it's not clear that it makes for a qualitative difference between terrorism and the other sorts of risks that we face. Threats of disruption to our way of life, even of the massive disruption that would be caused by a large-scale terrorist attack, can still be compared with the threatened disruption that would be caused trying to prevent them. Yet the precautionary principle implies that in the end there is no comparison.

---