The Proactionary Principle

[marchesarosa]

The Proactionary Principle
Posted on August 19, 2013
on Prof Judith Curry's blog, Climate Etc


Between no action and precaution.


The Proactionary Principle was conceptualized by Max More, and is outlined below. The proactionary principle is presented as an alternative to the precautionary principle. So what is wrong with the precautionary principle?

The precautionary principle has at least six major weak spots. It serves us badly by:

assuming worst-case scenarios
distracting attention from established threats to health, especially natural risks
assuming that the effects of regulation and restriction are all positive or neutral, never negative
ignoring potential benefits of technology and inherently favoring nature over humanity
illegitimately shifting the burden of proof and unfavorably positioning the proponent of the activity
conflicting with more balanced, common-law approaches to risk and harm.

More describes the essence of the proactionary principle as:

Most activities involving technology will have undesired effects as well as desirable ones. Whereas the precautionary principle is often used to take an absolutist stand against an activity, the Proactionary Principle allows for handling mixed effects through compensation and remediation instead of prohibition. The Proactionary Principle recognizes that nature is not always kind, that improving our world is both natural and essential for humanity, and that stagnation is not a realistic or worthy option.

The Proactionary Principle stands for the proactive pursuit of progress. Being proactive involves not only anticipating before acting, but learning by acting. When technological progress is halted, people lose an essential freedom and the accompanying opportunities to learn through diverse experiments. We already suffer from an undeveloped capacity for rational decision making. Prohibiting technological change will only stunt that capacity further. Continuing needs to alleviate global human suffering and desires to achieve human flourishing should make obvious the folly of stifling our freedom to learn.

More outlines 9 component principles to the proactionary principle:

Freedom to innovate: Our freedom to innovate technologically is valuable to humanity. The burden of proof therefore belongs to those who propose restrictive measures. All proposed measures should be closely scrutinized.
Objectivity: Use a decision process that is objective, structured, and explicit. Evaluate risks and generate forecasts according to available science, not emotionally shaped perceptions; use explicit forecasting processes; fully disclose the forecasting procedure; ensure that the information and decision procedures are objective; rigorously structure the inputs to the forecasting procedure; reduce biases by selecting disinterested experts, by using the devil’s advocate procedure with judgmental methods, and by using auditing procedures such as review panels.
Comprehensiveness: Consider all reasonable alternative actions, including no action. Estimate the opportunities lost by abandoning a technology, and take into account the costs and risks of substituting other credible options. When making these estimates, carefully consider not only concentrated and immediate effects, but also widely distributed and follow-on effects.
Openness/Transparency: Take into account the interests of all potentially affected parties, and keep the process open to input from those parties.
Simplicity: Use methods that are no more complex than necessary
Triage: Give precedence to ameliorating known and proven threats to human health and environmental quality over acting against hypothetical risks.
Symmetrical treatment: Treat technological risks on the same basis as natural risks; avoid underweighting natural risks and overweighting human-technological risks. Fully account for the benefits of technological advances.
Proportionality: Consider restrictive measures only if the potential impact of an activity has both significant probability and severity. In such cases, if the activity also generates benefits, discount the impacts according to the feasibility of adapting to the adverse effects. If measures to limit technological advance do appear justified, ensure that the extent of those measures is proportionate to the extent of the probable effects.
Prioritize (Prioritization): When choosing among measures to ameliorate unwanted side effects, prioritize decision criteria as follows: (a) Give priority to risks to human and other intelligent life over risks to other species; (b) give non-lethal threats to human health priority over threats limited to the environment (within reasonable limits); (c) give priority to immediate threats over distant threats; (d) prefer the measure with the highest expectation value by giving priority to more certain over less certain threats, and to irreversible or persistent impacts over transient impacts.
10.Renew and Refresh: Create a trigger to prompt decision makers to revisit the decision, far enough in the future that conditions may have changed significantly.

Steve Fuller has a recent essay on the proactionary principle at The Breakthrough Institute. Excerpts:

When dealing with complex systems, the science is such that there is a strong chance that any currently supported model of, say, climate change will be superseded by the time it would predict a major catastrophe. Put flippantly, you can be sure that if a model says the world will end in 50 years, the model itself will be gone in 25. From that standpoint, the precautionary principle can look quite shortsighted, as it places too much trust in today’s science, overlooking science’s long-term tendency to shift its ground, often as a result of a massive reinterpretation of data, which in turn leads to new projections.

Protection and promotion are, of course, not incompatible, but they pull in opposite directions. If you believe that you are in the business of protecting people, then minimising risk can become an end in itself. Thus, the welfare state is often said to provide a “safety net” for the most vulnerable members of society, who in principle could be anyone, given the world’s fundamental uncertainty.

But some critics would reverse the priority of protection over promotion of humanity as the goal of government. The proactionary principle valorizes calculated risk-taking as essential to human progress, where the capacity for progress is taken to define us as a species.

Moreover, “proactionaries” believe that by restricting risk-taking the “precautionaries” place humanity at still greater risk, as we are prevented from making the sort of radical experiments that in the past had resulted in major leaps in knowledge that enabled us to overcome our natural limits. Perhaps the proactionaries overstate their case. Nevertheless, were any of the path-breaking lab-based research that was done on humans and other mammals before, say, 1980 to be proposed to the precautionary institutional review boards that authorise academic research today, they would probably face serious objects if not be outright prohibited

more here
judithcurry.com/2013/08/19/proactionary-principle/#more-12526

[alancalverd]

The inherent weakness of the precautionary principle is that nothing should be done until it is proved safe. But you can't prove or disprove its safety without doing it. Therefore nothing should be done.

Fortunately sane people set an acceptable quality level (AQL) for uncertain activities, and proceed until the AQL is breached.

Unfortunately our unelected masters have no concept of AQL (or sanity for that matter) and bizarre edicts flow from the EU. The first draft of the Physical Hazards Directive included such brilliant prohibitions as "no oven may be constructed with an opening large enough for a person to enter" which would have put paid to most heavy industries, and outlawed cremation.

[marchesarosa]

In terms of climate change the precautionary principle is based merely on models of the climate which have never been validated, i.e. with no proven skill in prediction of the future. If a model had proved useful in predicting the future one could understand taking it seriously but behaving AS IF failed models were useful guides to the future and acting upon them is mad.

[adamadamant]

Aug 22, 2013 12:54:32 GMT 1 marchesarosa said:

In terms of climate change the precautionary principle is based merely on models of the climate which have never been validated, i.e. with no proven skill in prediction of the future. If a model had proved useful in predicting the future one could understand taking it seriously but behaving AS IF failed models were useful guides to the future and acting upon them is mad.

I don't think that is entirely true since rising sea levels have been seen to occur in certain parts of the world as predicted by climate change. The climate is an extremely complex process and has always been subject to the fickleness of nature, however, what we are seeing is, in general, more or less in line with the predictions of global warming. What climatologists do is present models of what might happen in the future to the climate within specific parameters, that is, the best and worst scenarios. Even the day to day predictions of short term weather is not an exact science so how much less trying to predict exactly what is going to happen years in the future?

Climate change is based on the scientific principles of chemistry and physics, which have been established for centuries, therefore, we really do have to go with the science. The earth is a huge complex of dynamic processes which interact in ways we still do not fully understand so it is not so easy to make clear cut predictions about exactly how and to what extent the climate will change. Having said, this I don't think there is much doubt among experts that the earth is in fact in a natural warming phase and that this warming phase is being seriously exacerbated to a dangerous degree by the activity human beings. The earth has always gone through periods of natural warming and cooling but the point here is the extremely rapid increase in average temperatures over the past fifty or sixty years which correlates exactly with the increase in the emission of greenhouse gases by human beings. Case closed, I think.