To Do No Harm? The Precautionary Principle and Moral Values

Philosophy of Management 1 (3):11-20 (2001)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

From over 2000 years ago the ideal expressed in the Hippocratic Oath has encouraged doctors never knowingly to do harm: primum non nocere. Over 25 years ago the management writer Peter Drucker proposed it as the basis of a management ethic, ‘the right rule for the ethics managers need, the ethics of responsibility’.1 He argued then that the rule had wide scope encompassing for instance executive compensation, management rhetoric and the management of business impacts. In 2000 the United Nations Global Compact embodied a Principle 7 enjoining ‘a precautionary approach to environmental challenges’ as defined in Principle 15 of the 1992 Rio Declaration. But what can such precautionary injunctions mean in practice? And what of conflicts with other values? Robin Attfield lays out the key questions he argues need to be asked about the Precautionary Principle if it is to be taken seriously and acted upon soundly. His focus is on the management of vulnerable resources — specifically planetary ecosystems — with whose management knowingly or otherwise we are all concerned.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,616

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Formulating the Precautionary Principle.Neil A. Manson - 2002 - Environmental Ethics 24 (3):263-274.
The moral foundation of the precautionary principle.Karsten Klint Jensen - 2002 - Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 15 (1):39-55.
A core precautionary principle.Stephen M. Gardiner - 2006 - Journal of Political Philosophy 14 (1):33–60.
How not to criticize the precautionary principle.Jonathan Hughes - 2006 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 31 (5):447 – 464.
Prudent Precaution in Clinical Trials of Nanomedicines.Gary E. Marchant & Rachel A. Lindor - 2012 - Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 40 (4):831-840.
Future technologies, dystopic futures and the precautionary principle.Steve Clarke - 2005 - Ethics and Information Technology 7 (3):121-126.

Analytics

Added to PP
2013-06-12

Downloads
38 (#365,484)

6 months
2 (#668,348)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Robin Attfield
Cardiff University

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

Reasons and Persons.Derek Parfit - 1984 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
The Ethics of the Global Environment.Robin Attfield - 2015 - Edinburgh Studies in Global Et.
Can We Harm Furture People?Alan Carter - 2001 - Environmental Values 10 (4):429-454.

View all 8 references / Add more references