In recent months, both sides of the Atlantic have witnessed renewed calls to apply the so-called Precautionary Principle to limit, if not outright, stop a variety of publicly and privately funded research and development projects around the topic of ‘synthetic biology’, an umbrella term for all attempts to redesign life, either by altering existing organisms or introducing new ones. The UK’s Green Party, currently enjoying its first Member of Parliament, has even proposed a permanent precautionary branch of government with the power to refer any legislation back to committee if it fails to be properly cognizant of its potential effects on future generations. You can find out more about it here. However, the most ambitious attempt to enforce the Precautionary Principle will be unveiled in one week’s time (18th April) at Washington’s Wilson Center. 113 NGOs from across the world have signed a statement that would effectively impose enough regulations on the pursuit of synthetic biology to make it unfeasible. If you’re interested in finding out more or attending the event, go here.
Generally speaking, the Precautionary Principle proposes a version of the Hippocratic Oath for the entire planet: i.e. above all else, do no harm. At first hearing, who could disagree? However, in practice, it turns out to be a radically risk-averse strategy that mistakenly sees the wholesale arresting of scientific and technological innovation as the solution to genuine problems of social injustice, poverty, inequality, insecurity, etc. I say ‘wholesale’ quite deliberately because, while Precautionaries have been traditionally preoccupied with stopping the spread of ‘genetically modified organisms’, their arguments are typically pitched at such a level of generality and abstraction that they could be easily extended to any genuine innovation in the Schumpeterian sense – that is, a market game-changer. In short, Precautionaries are completely blind to the positive character of risk-taking, even when the risks fail. Indeed, the failures may teach us more, if the data they provide are collected and made publicly available so that others may learn and take more informed risks in the future. A truly progressive society insures against the inevitable negative outcomes of risk-taking without discouraging the taking of risk altogether.
Behind this last sentence is an alternative to the Precautionary Principle, namely, the Proactionary Principle, which has been so far promoted only in transhumanist circles. You can read its latest version here. The Proactionary Principle ties our distinctiveness as creatures to our proven capacity for taking calculated risks from which we emerge not dead but stronger as a species. The trick is to provide a normative framework that makes the Proactionary Principle attractive not only to self-styled heroic entrepreneurs and libertarians but also to ordinary, often vulnerable people who are not normally inclined to risk so much of themselves and the world for some unknown future. At the moment, Veronika Lipinska and I are writing a book that will sketch out the basis for a new sort of welfare state that is not so much focussed on preventing worst outcomes but rather encourages the taking of risks from which all of society may benefit.
Ha, I’ve been wondering where the NGO reaction against synbio was happening. There it is (though you might want to remove the fullstop from the end of that link to the Wilson Center, as currently brakes it).
You seen this from Latour on the precautionary principle? http://breakthroughjournal.org/content/authors/bruno-latour/love-your-monsters.shtml
Risks that the whole society benefits from? Tales of 50 years ago that we would have a crisis of leisure because robots would be doing so much of our work neglected to note that the masters of the universe would simply snatch the excess for themselves, becoming today’s 1%. I dont share your confidence that the risks will be shared equally.
I agree. This is why you need to design appropriate policies for making the Proactionary Principle work to everyone’s benefit. This is what Lipinska and I are working. One feature of our new welfare state proposal that is relevant to your point is inspired by the Appendix to the Michael Crichton novel Next, in which calls for the state to own all intellectual property rights over human genetic material. (The novel is partly about people becoming de facto slaves to big business once it controls their genes.) In any case, we’re not trying to predict the future but to make it happen.
My thinking has been about shale gas development, which requires the new mix of technologies (horizontal drilling, fracking, and new seismic imaging). We have followed something like the proactionary principle here (it seems) in the U.S. with this. The government subsidized private work on this and provided its own R&D. The government even expemted it from certain environmental regulations.
So, it becomes economically feasible under those conditions. We then start doing it and, as you say, monitoring the consequences – we don’t require all the science be done up front, but rather do science-policy as a co-construction.
But, I echo Bob’s point here, the “we” doing the monitoring of the consequences are the citizens living near the toxic activities and some poorly funded academic and NGO scientists. Meanwhile, the industry is able to effectively play merchants of doubt with their deep pockets – plus the proactionary principle sets the burden of proof on the poor “we” who will not be able to tip the scales until after much damage has been done (if at all). The science-policy co-construction here has some troubling asymmetries in it in terms of money and power.
So, it seems to me that in this case there are some serious inequity issues. Another one being that cities now are left to try to write legislation for this stuff in the absence of federal and state leadership, and they are really not prepared to do this well.
What drives me batty is that some of this is not at all hard to predict. The process takes tons of toxic chemicals and puts them in the environment….we gotta have a way to red flag that and make it better before it becomes a large scale experiment to be monitored.
Finally, what both proactionary and precautionary seem miss is the prior question about whether extracting shale gas is a good thing to do. Precautionary folks don’t question that, they just want to guarantee it can be done safely. But the whole project is premised on the idea that ever more consumption of energy is good…I don’t buy it. We would have done better to believe Carter in 1978 that we were running out of gas. That would have served as a wonderful noble lie that could have started us moving, 35 years ago, toward a steady state….but you see, this is where Steve and I disagree at root: I think humans were leading better lives in 1978 and he thinks the best is yet to come.