Originally circulated on 8 May 2020
Hi fellow Ruminants & Groupies in Lock Down Level 4
Greetings from day 42 of lock down. Over the past two weeks I have received a number of worthy submissions for Ruminant Pink Friday’s ™ which I am thinking about. However because 42 is so significant I am asserting the only dominance I have left which is editorial independence over Ruminant Pink Friday’s ™.
The global lock down and particularly the extremely stringent lock down in South Africa has set me thinking about the precautionary principle upon which I guess this is based. For those of you who may be unfamiliar with the precautionary principle I will first try to define it:
When an activity (or event) 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. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/precautionary-principle
This sounds like a benign and obvious statement right? Well the precautionary principle has a strong and a weak form. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle. The precautionary principle in its weak form is indeed benign and sensible and amounts to look before you leap.
The precautionary principle has its origins in environmental concerns in the 1970’s where German lawmakers adopted a clean air act banning use of certain substances suspected of causing environmental damage even though evidence of their impact was inconclusive at that time.
Then the lawyers and politicians got involved and the principle is an underlying rationale for a large and increasing number of international treaties and laws. Over time the benign principle became stronger and stronger and so in 2001 we had:
The Precautionary Principle says that if some course of action carries even a remote chance of irreparable damage to the ecology, then you shouldn’t do it, no matter how great the possible advantages of the action may be. You are not allowed to balance costs against benefits when deciding what to do.
— Freeman Dyson, Report from 2001 World Economic Forum
This can serve as a statement of the strong precautionary principle. Let’s pretend trade-offs don’t exist. Dyson’s statement is logically inconsistent.
As Michael Crichton wrote in his novel State of Fear: “The ‘precautionary principle’, properly applied, forbids the precautionary principle”
Everything we do has risks, consequences and trade-offs, including doing nothing. There are strong reasons for doubting its usefulness as a rule for making decisions, either because it contradicts other more fundamental principles of rationality or is normatively empty—that is, it has no implications for what ought to be done. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1852769/
This brings me to issue of hard lockdown looking only at flattening the curve to minimise Covid 19 deaths without balancing the costs against the benefits. These costs are not only financial but include human misery and starvation. It is time for a more rational discussion.
Please keep the submission ideas flowing.
Regards
Bruce
Ruminant Pink Friday 