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Risk, Precaution, and Nanotechnology

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In Pursuit of Nanoethics

Part of the book series: The International Library of Ethics, Law and Technology ((ELTE,volume 10))

Abstract

Nanotechnology offers much promise, both in terms of the development of new nanotechnology and the development of novel uses for extant nanotechnology. Alongside these developments, commentators enumerate various associated risks; such risks could be specific (e.g., environmental, economic) or else more general (e.g., social, ethical). But comparatively little conceptual work has been done on the very nature of ‘risk’: what does it mean for something to be a risk (or to carry a risk)? And how does the nature of risk integrate, most fundamentally, with rational deliberation? On this latter question, proposals are often made regarding cost-benefit analysis or precautionary principles, but there are various issues with these proposals.

This chapter is adapted, with permission, from two previous versions. See Fritz Allhoff, “Risk, Precaution, and Emerging Technologies,” Studies in Ethics, Law, and Society 3.2 (2009): 1–27. See also Fritz Allhoff, Patrick Lin, and Daniel Moore, What Is Nanotechnology and Why Does It Matter?: From Science to Ethics (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 73–95. The ideas herein were presented at a conference hosted by the University of Delaware—Environmental Nanoparticles: Science, Ethics, and Policy (2008)—and I thank those participants for useful discussion. I also thank Mark Cutter for feedback on this version, and Mark, Patrick Lin, and an anonymous reviewer for comments on a previous version.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    My own research in this regard has predominantly been in the social and ethical issues of nanotechnology, though this essay generalizes beyond nanotechnology. For readers interested in these more specific discussions, see Fritz Allhoff et al., Nanoethics: The Ethical and Social Dimension of Nanotechnology (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2007). See also Fritz Allhoff and Patrick Lin (eds.), Nanotechnology & Society: Current and Emerging Ethical Issues (Dordrecht: Springer, 2008). See also Fritz Allhoff, Patrick Lin, and Daniel Moore, What Is Nanotechnology and Why Does It Matter?: From Science to Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2010).

  2. 2.

    Sven Ove Hansson, “Philosophical Perspectives on Risk”, Techné 8.1 (2004): 10.

  3. 3.

    Ibid.

  4. 4.

    Sven Ove Hansson, “What Is Philosophy of Risk?”, Theoria 62 (1996b): 170.

  5. 5.

    See Sven Ove Hansson, “Decision Making under Great Uncertainty”, Philosophy of the Social Sciences 26.3 (1996a): 369–386.

  6. 6.

    See, for example, W.E. Cooke, “Fibrosis of the Lungs Due to the Inhalation of Asbestos Dust”, British Medical Journal 2 (1924): 147–150. In 1899 a London doctor, H. Montague Murray, connected the death of a factory worker to asbestos inhalation, after doing a post-mortem examination. The Cooke paper, though, as well as a report that came out shortly thereafter, were what established widespread recognition of the link. For the report, see E.R.A. Merewether and C.W. Price, Report on Effects of Asbestos Dust on the Lung. London: H.M. Stationery Office (1930).

  7. 7.

    Technically, everything could be classified as decision under uncertainty, so long as zero and one were allowed as the probabilities that some consequence would attain.

  8. 8.

    Ibid., 171.

  9. 9.

    Ibid., 172. See also Charles Sanders Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief” in Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (eds.), Collected Papers of Charles Peirce (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934), pp. 223–247.

  10. 10.

    For an accessible introduction to Bayesianism, see Peter Godfrey-Smith, Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), ch. 14. For a more technical discussion, see John Earman, Bayes or Bust: A Critical Examination of Bayesian Confirmation Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).

  11. 11.

    For our purposes, various nuances and conceptions of cost-benefit analysis are largely unimportant, though there is an important literature in this regard. One of the most ardent defenders of cost-benefit analysis is Richard Posner; see, for example, his Catastrophe: Risk and Response (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Cass Sunstein has written extensively on this topic; see, especially, his The Cost-Benefit State (Washington, DC: American Bar Association, 2002) and Risk and Reason: Safety, Law, and the Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). Frank Ackerman and Lisa Heinzerling critique cost-benefit analysis in Priceless: On Knowing the Price of Everything and the Value of Nothing (New York: New Press, 2003). Sunstein offers a review essay of contemporary scholarship, including Posner (2004) and Ackerman and Heinzerling (2003) in “Cost Benefit-Analysis and the Environment”, Ethics 115 (2005a): 351–385. See also Kristen Shrader-Frechette, Taking Action, Saving Lives: Our Duties to Protect Environmental and Public Health (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

  12. 12.

    See, for example, W. Kip Viscusi, Fatal Tradeoffs (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). See also Ackerman and Heinzerling (2003).

  13. 13.

    Sunstein (2002), pp. 153–190 offers more discussion in a chapter called “The Arithmetic of Arsenic”.

  14. 14.

    Note that much of the literature refers to the precautionary principle, though I shall talk about a precautionary principle or else precautionary principles. The reason is that there is hardly any sort of definitive statement of “the” precautionary principle, but rather many different formulations that bear various relations to each other.

  15. 15.

    Sunstein (2005a) argues that Europe has been more sympathetic to precautionary approaches whereas the US has defended cost-benefit analysis (p. 351). I am more interested in the philosophical underpinnings of the approaches than their applications, but this phenomenon bears notice. See also Sunstein (2002). See also Arie Trouwborst, Evolution and Status of the Precautionary Principle in International Law (London: Kluwer Law International, 2002). Finally, see Poul Harremoës et al. (eds.), The Precautionary Principle in the 20th Century: Late Lessons from Early Warnings (London: Earthscan, 2002).

  16. 16.

    Available online at http://www.un.org/documents/ga/conf151/aconf15126-1annex1.htm (accessed July 27, 2013).

  17. 17.

    Available online at http://www.sehn.org/wing.html (accessed July 27, 2013).

  18. 18.

    Available online at http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/health_consumer/library/press/press38_en.print.html (accessed July 27, 2013).

  19. 19.

    For a further discussion of this account, see Tim Low, Feral Future: The Untold Story of Australia’s Exotic Invaders (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). For a more general theoretical account of invasive species, see Julie Lockwood, Martha Hoopes, and Michael Marchetti, Invasion Ecology (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2006).

  20. 20.

    The concept of irreversibility is hardly transparent, though we shall not pursue further discussion here. For some of the conceptual complications, see Cass R. Sunstein, “Two Conceptions of Irreversible Environmental Harm” (May 2008). University of Chicago Law & Economics, Olin Working Paper No. 407. Available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1133164 (accessed June 6, 2009). See also Neil A. Manson, “The Concept of Irreversibility: Its Use in the Sustainable Development and Precautionary Principle Literatures”, Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development 1.1 (2007): 1–15.

  21. 21.

    See, for example, Fritz Allhoff, “The Coming Era of Nanomedicine”, The American Journal of Bioethics (in press).

  22. 22.

    See, for example, Patrick Lin and Fritz Allhoff, “Untangling the Debate: The Ethics of Human Enhancement”, Nanoethics: The Ethics of Technologies that Converge at the Nanoscale 2.3 (2008): 251–264.

  23. 23.

    Neil A. Manson, “Formulating the Precautionary Principle”, Environmental Ethics 24 (2002): 263–272. See also Per Sandin, “Dimensions of the Precautionary Principle”, Human and Ecological Risk Assessment 5.5 (1999): 889–907 and Carl F. Cranor, “Toward Understanding Aspects of the Precautionary Principle”, Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 29.3 (2004): 259–279.

  24. 24.

    Manson (2002), p. 265.

  25. 25.

    These various possibilities are adapted from Manson (2002), p. 267.

  26. 26.

    For more discussion, see Carl F. Cranor, “Asymmetric Information, the Precautionary Principle, and Burdens of Proof” in Carolyn Raffensperger and Joel Tickner (eds.), Protecting Public Health and the Environment: Implementing the Precautionary Principle (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1999), pp. 74–99.

  27. 27.

    Though also see Cranor (1999) for more discussion.

  28. 28.

    Available online at http://www.un.org/documents/ga/conf151/aconf15126-1annex1.htm (accessed July 27, 2013).

  29. 29.

    See also Manson (2002), pp. 270–274. Note that Posner (2004) explicitly defends cost-benefit analysis even under prospective catastrophe.

  30. 30.

    See also John Weckert and James Moore, “The Precautionary Principle in Nanotechnology”, International Journal of Applied Philosophy 2.2 (2006): 191–204.

  31. 31.

    For more discussion, see David B. Resnik, “Is the Precautionary Principle Unscientific”, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 34 (2003): 329–344.

  32. 32.

    See, for example, Manson (2002), p. 264; Weckert and Moor (2006), p. 191. Sunstein (2005a) alleges a “tension” between precautionary and cost-benefit approaches (p. 352) though then goes on to suggest that the views are “complementary” (p. 355). These certainly look like different claims, but I am ultimately sympathetic to the latter, as will be expressed below.

  33. 33.

    Sunstein (2005a), p. 355; see also pp. 366–369. Sunstein means this criticism to apply to the precautionary principle more generally, rather than to the catastrophe formulation in particular. I disagree and think that the criticism, at best, attaches to catastrophe-like formulations because different knowledge conditions (e.g., ones requiring “likely” rather that “possible”) are unaffected by the criticism. See also Cass R. Sunstein, “Beyond the Precautionary Principle”, Pennsylvania Law Review 151 (2003): 1003–1058 and Cass R. Sunstein, Laws of Fear: Beyond the Precautionary Principle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005b). For a detailed response to the incoherence objections, see Jonathan Hughes, “How Not to Criticize the Precautionary Principle”, Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 31 (2006): 447–464.

  34. 34.

    See, for example, Allhoff et al. (2010), pp. 126–149.

  35. 35.

    Another criticism, not presented here, is that precautionary approaches contribute to, and even promote, unfounded public fears. See Adam Burgess, Cellular Phones, Public Fears, and a Culture of Precaution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

  36. 36.

    For more detailed responses to some of these criticisms, see Stephen M. Gardiner, “A Core Precautionary Principle”, Journal of Political Philosophy 14.1 (March 2006): 33–60. Gardiner defends a particular version of the precautionary principle, arguing that his formulation—different from the catastrophe principle—is immune to standard criticisms.

  37. 37.

    A similar attitude is expressed by Posner (2004), who argues that cost-benefit analysis “is an indispensible step in rational decision making”, even in under catastrophic risk (p. 139); quoted in Sunstein (2005a), p. 363.

  38. 38.

    A classic on this issue is Mark Sagoff, “At the Shrine of Our Lady of Fatima; or, Why All Political Questions Are Not All Economic”, Arizona Law Review 23.4 (1981): 1283–1298.

  39. 39.

    Cf., Posner (2004). See Gardiner (2006) for a contrary proposal.

  40. 40.

    Consider, for example, Ackerman and Heinzerling (2003), who mean to be offering a critique of cost-benefit analysis and a defense of precaution. If, for example, our nation spends more than it needs to on regulatory protection, its “preference is to tilt toward overinvestment in protecting ourselves and our descendents.” (p. 227); quoted in Sunstein (2005a), p. 359. But this “precaution” is just demonstrating a collective agreement that the prospective negative consequences are really bad and that we hardly want to countenance their actualization.

    However, this is hardly antithetical to cost-benefit analysis, which has to be able to accommodate our preferences: what else would “cost” and “benefit” even mean as wholly independent of our preferences? There might be cases, like the forests, where we want to ascribe value independently of our preferences, but there are other cases, like whether to effect a tax increase to support a farm subsidy, that cannot be understood without thinking about how put off we would be by the tax increase, what impacts it would have on the food supply (and whether we would care about those), and so on.

    So, when we “over”-invest, all we are doing is demonstrating that we take the cost to be worth the protection that it affords us against a negative outcome; this protection could be economic, psychological, moral, or symbolic. (Cf., for example, the war on terror, which almost certainly costs far more money than it could ever prevent in terms of economic damages.) This is not to say that we are infallible with all of our protective investments, though it is to say that we can rationally accommodate risk-aversion under a cost-benefit framework.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI, USA

    Fritz Allhoff

  2. Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, Charles Sturt University, Canberra, Australia

    Fritz Allhoff

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  1. Dublin City University, Dublin 9, Ireland

    Bert Gordijn

  2. University of Central Lancashire, Preston, United Kingdom

    Anthony Mark Cutter

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Allhoff, F. (2014). Risk, Precaution, and Nanotechnology. In: Gordijn, B., Cutter, A. (eds) In Pursuit of Nanoethics. The International Library of Ethics, Law and Technology, vol 10. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6817-1_8

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