Abstract

Policy decisions about whether to regulate environmental threats of harm whose impacts are unknown are commonly grounded in our epistemic limitations: in our inability to confirm the severity of the adverse consequences of exposure, or the probability that this anticipated harm will occur, or the causes of manifest harms. Yet, both advocates and opponents of preventative measures to protect public health have conventionally appealed to the lack of scientific evidence to justify their antithetical policy recommendations. This places contemporary debates about precautionary risk regulation at an untenable impasse—requiring proponents to ground the precautionary principle in something other than our epistemic limitations. This chapter sketches an alternative, normative justification for precautionary safeguards: namely, that individuals have a right, as a matter of moral equality, not to have emitters gamble with their welfare by putting them in potential harm’s way.