Precautionary Principle: Will False Rationality Stop Progress?

While working on a chapter dealing with the
precautionary principle for a new book, I came across a superb
essay in The Freeman from economics Nobelist Friedrich
Hayek, The
Case for Freedom. Taken from his The Constitution of
Liberty (1960), Hayek explained how progress is only possible
if people are free to engage in a process of trial-and-error. In
fact, we advance most by learning from our errors. What worries me
is that strong version of the precautionary principle endorsed by
so many progressives permits only trials without errors. The
canonical version is the Wingspread Statement that
reads:

When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the
environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some
cause and effect relationships are not fully established
scientifically.

In this context the proponent of an activity, rather than the
public, should bear the burden of proof.

In other words, proponents of the precauationary principle
require innovators to foresee basically all of the effects their
new products and services before they will be permitted. In his
essay, Hayek explained almost four decades before the Wingspread
Statement how the demand for perfect human foresight would bring an
end to progress:

It is worth our while to consider for a moment what would happen
if only what was agreed to be the best available knowledge were to
be used in all action. If all at­tempts that seemed wasteful in the
light of generally accepted knowl­edge were prohibited and only
such questions asked, or such experi­ments tried, as seemed
significant in the light of ruling opinion, man­kind might well
reach a point where its knowledge enabled it to predict the
consequences of all con­ventional actions and to avoid all
disappointment or failure. Man would then seem to have subjected
his surroundings to his reason, for he would attempt only
those things which were totally predictable in their
results (emphasis added). We might conceive of a
civilization coming to a stand­still, not because the possibilities
of further growth had been ex­hausted, but because man had
suc­ceeded in so completely subjecting all his actions and his
immediate surroundings to his existing state of knowledge that
there would be no occasion for new knowledge to appear. …

In the past, the spontane­ous forces of growth, however much
restricted, could usually still assert themselves against the
or­ganized coercion of the state. With the technological means of
control now at the disposal of government, it is not certain that
such assertion is still possible; at any rate, it may soon become
impossible. We are not far from the point where the deliberately
organized forces of society may destroy those spon­taneous forces
which have made advance possible.

Reading Hayek’s whole
essay is well worth your time. See also my article, “A
Precautionary Tale,” on the horrors of the precautionary
principle.