Christian Responsibility and Uncertaintly: The Question of Precaution
From the Covalence Archives
by Per Anderson
In his groundbreaking book, The Imperative of Responsibility, Hans Jonas proposes a new ethics for the “altered nature” of human action in a technological world. On the collective level, humans possess and routinely employ new, immense, and consequential powers. As a result, received moral traditions are no longer adequate for a sustainable future. In these traditions, humans did not think of technological endeavor—techne—as a sphere of moral significance or social decision. These traditional ethics were anthropocentric, dealing only with human interactions. Human moral worlds were small and local—in scope of action, in planning, in duration, and in accountability.
In this world of limits, people could know and do the good on the basis of common knowledge. Expert knowledge was not required. But this is no longer true. For Jonas, in a world where humans can extend the span of bodily life, cultivate preferred mental states, and manipulate genes, humans need an ethics with new assumptions and norms. One need is knowledge commensurate with the causal scale of human action. Another need is moral concern for the future. For Jonas, we are the first humans that need an ethics for “the global condition of human life and the far-off future, even existence, of the race.” Jonas terms this new ethics “responsibility.”
In this talk, I want to explore the question of how Christians should live in the technological age by examining the precautionary principle. Assuming that Jonas is right about the limits of traditional ethics, does the precautionary principle help? Yes, it embodies much of what Jonas thinks humans should do, and yet the principle is contested across our world and still unknown in North America. I want, then, to give voice to Jonas’s call and will discuss one contemporary American ethicist, William Schweiker, who has developed a Christian ethics of responsibility to answer Jonas—and others. His imperative of responsibility, however, could benefit from some subsidiary principles. The precautionary principle seems to serve.
Although the precautionary principle has been around for over 35 years, first articulated in German thought as “vorsorge-prinzip” (prospective or anticipatory care), there is no universally accepted definition. An influential version in contained in the Rio Declaration of 1992 (#15), but others have been proposed, because precaution actually informs many international agreements today and guides the European Commission. Recently, UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) released a study that forwards a new definition, which I will use. My own interest in the precautionary principle derives from ongoing work on transgenic agriculture. I endorse the principle and relish this opportunity to test this conviction before a group of scientists and scientifically minded people. Some critics think the precautionary principle spells the end of the scientific and technological society, as we know it. To be discussed, I hope.
Back to Jonas. Jonas claims that the accumulated wisdom of the race about how to pursue the good life no longer serves us well. All previous ethics—the Decalogue, the Golden Rule, the Golden Mean—fail to address what Jonas terms “a whole new dimension of ethical relevance for which there is no precedent in the standards and canons of traditional ethics.” (You may recall my comment about “moral relevance” on Friday.) Something new should be taken into consideration that has never before been taken into consideration when humans have sought the good life. That new dimension of moral relevance is the future. The future needs to matter morally in a way that it has never mattered. Why? Because of the “altered nature of human action” in the technological era. In a word, power. Because of the nature and extent of collective human power, humans need to increase their sense of moral responsibility to include “the future,” and this would be new. In previous ethics, the future was up to the gods. But, for Jonas, it is up to us.
How so? What’s really so new? For Jonas, the whole package of science-based technology (the novelty of its methods, the unprecedented nature of some of its objects, the sheer magnitude of most of its enterprises, and the indefinitely cumulative propagation of its effects. This is not to say that the old ethics that advanced the human race—love, justice, nonviolence, honor—no longer hold. They hold where they have always held—in the day-by-day sphere of ordinary human interactions. But a qualitative extension of human power into nature and into human nature opens up a new domain of moral accountability such that traditional notions of the good life and the good person should be revised.
Particularly important for Jonas and directly relevant to the question of precaution is the matter of knowledge. In traditional ethics, common knowledge and common sense were sufficient for knowing right from wrong. Jonas quotes Immanuel Kant, writing at the end of 18th century: “human reason can, in matters of morality, be easily brought to a high degree of accuracy and completeness even in the most ordinary intelligence … there is no need of science or philosophy for knowing what man has to do in order to be honest and good, indeed to be wise and virtuous.” For Kant, scientific and technological literacy is not a moral duty. The good society does not depend upon scientific expertise—reason suffices.
For Jonas, Kant can no longer guide us: “Knowledge … becomes a prime duty beyond anything claimed for it heretofore, and the knowledge must be commensurate with the causal scale of our action. The fact that it cannot really be thus commensurate, that is, that the predictive knowledge falls behind the technical knowledge that nourishes our power to act, itself assumes ethical importance. The gap between the ability to foretell and the power to act creates a novel moral problem. With the latter so superior to the former, recognition of ignorance becomes the obverse of the duty to know and thus part of the ethics that must govern the evermore necessary self-policing of our oversized might. No previous ethics had to consider the global condition of human life and the far-off future, even existence, of the race. These now being an issue demands, in brief, a new conception of duties and rights, for which previous ethics and metaphysics provide not even the principles, let alone a ready doctrine.”
In this passage, Jonas notes a moral problem (“the gap between the ability to foretell and the power to act”) that the precautionary principle seeks to address. But before we turn to precaution, we should look briefly at two questions: 1) Is Jonas right about the limited, anthropocentric character of all previous ethics? 2) Does a Christian want to embrace Jonas’ constructive vision of accountability for the future? First, is Jonas right about traditional ethics? I am not aware of anyone who takes issue with Jonas’s idea of the “altered nature of human ethics.” New moral concepts and values do spring up in history, in response to new cultural conditions. Jonas is not alone in claiming that the something new and consequential has happened in the rise of modern technology and that responsibility is about a new way of being in the world.
In the past, technology was not the subject of moral reflection because human artifice did not make much difference to the human good. But at some point in the 20th century that changed. Consider the American theologian Philip Hefner, writing in 1993: “We now live in a condition that may be termed technological civilization. This condition is characterized by the fact that human decision has conditioned virtually all of the planetary physico-biogenetic systems, so that human decision is the critical factor in the continued functioning of the planet’s systems.” This is the collective human power that claims Jonas’ attention. The question for ethics is: Is this situation morally relevant? Does new power makes a difference for ethics?
In the global public square, the answer is yes. I mentioned the widespread adoption of the precautionary principle in international law and by international bodies. Another telling affirmation of precaution can be found in the Earth Charter, released in March 2000. The Earth Charter is a consensus statement based upon the most participatory process that history has seen. This important result of an emerging global civil society exhibits a clear sense of context that pictures “the future” as an open question and explicitly claims “humanity must choose its future.” The charter articulates an ethics of “universal responsibility” that assumes an estimate of human power equivalent to Jonas or Hefner. For this document, “the future at once holds great peril and great promise” not because of technology per se, but because of the “increasingly interdependent and fragile” character of the world. But what accounts for this interdependence and fragility? Human power seems so obvious it needs no mention.
Second, does a Christian want to embrace Jonas—to be a responsible subject of the planetary future? In reflecting upon the emergence of responsibility in recent ethics, Gerald McKenny at Notre Dame argues that the modern concept of responsibility signals both an intensification of the role of the human subject in ethics and a reflexive limitation upon that subject. Responsibility ethics are an adaptive response to power. Further, responsibility implies that more is up to the human than in past ethics, which correlates with something more than power, namely, a modern withdrawal of God from the world and the expansion of human freedom. One can see this in the theological anthropology (theology of human nature) that Philip Hefner proposes for our humanized world. This anthropology clearly affirms Jonas’ responsibility: “Human beings [says Hefner] are God’s created co-creators whose purpose is to be the agency, acting in freedom, to birth the future that is most wholesome for the nature that has birthed us—the nature that is not only our own genetic heritage, but also the entire human community and the evolutionary and ecological reality in which and to which we belong. Exercising this agency is said to be God’s will for humans.” In Hefner, we see a Christianity that wants to understand our technological era as part of the evolutionary process. Technology is not alien from nature. The nature that birthed the human birthed creatures that create. For Hefner, Christians should embrace responsibility—“to birth the future that is most wholesome for the nature that birthed us.” Further, the realization of God’s will in the world is up to God and up to us.
So, as Hefner’s work argues, a Christian can embrace a responsibility ethics along lines that Jonas proposes. To illustrate this further, I turn now to William Schweiker. With Jonas, Schweiker contends that the most pressing moral problem is “the radical extension of human power in the contemporary world.” For Schweiker, the problem is not simply that we now have power to destroy the planet. Equally serious is the moral confusion and uncertainty that surrounds the exercise of modern power. Human power increasingly becomes an end in itself, governed only by an ethics of authenticity or self-fulfillment. For Schweiker, the case for responsibility (the morally proper use of power) faces daunting challenges from the late-modern moral outlook. At the very moment in history when Jonas calls for committed and critical agency, the peoples of technological societies are seriously at sea about the ideas that should guide them.
For Schweiker, “responsibility” proves to be more than a morality attuned to the future. Responsible exercise of power requires several things. Among them, it demands the cultivation of moral integrity as an abiding commitment to a center beyond the self, what Schweiker terms “the integrity of life.” It requires recognition of the various goods of life (material, social, reflective) and ability to enact integrated responses on behalf of the “wholeness of life” (recall Hefner’s interest in the “wholesome”).
Time does not permit an adequate treatment of Schweiker’s ethics. I want, however, to commend his basic principle of responsibility as a fruitful framework for considering the question of precaution. For Schweiker, the imperative of responsibility is this: In all our actions and relations we are to respect and enhance the integrity of life before God. This is the sum of a Christian life. Various interlocking goods—material, social, and reflective—constitute life. While the goods of life are diverse, humans also seek unity and coherence in what they do. They want to be persons of integrity who are dedicated to respecting and enhancing life in its moral complexity (or density) and its wholeness (or integrity).
Schweiker’s understanding of respect and enhancement is worthy of note. For Schweiker, humans live first and foremost under an imperative to respect—to recognize and show regard for others and for one’s self. As life makes a claim upon the self, it also establishes constraints upon what can and should be done. Subjects of respect cannot be treated as means to other ends. Subjects of respect are members of the same moral community. An important part of the moral life involves recognizing and showing regard for others and for the wider web of life. Respect constitutes a moral baseline for all actions and relations. But the imperative of responsibility in Christianity calls for humans to enhance the community of life as well—to make it better. This means that humans should work for the flourishing of life in all of its complexity but not in ways that violate the demand of respect. Respect governs amelioration.
Schweiker’s imperative of responsibility captures and seeks to regulate a basic and perhaps creative tension of classic Christian morality—between living in conformity and consent to the givenness of life and living critically and creatively in anticipation of the transformative reign of God through unconditional service to the needy neighbor. In an age of ecological crisis rooted in an ethics of domination, people of good will strive to discern the human place in a larger natural whole and to limit their agency in ways that give space to life beyond them. In an age of emancipation rooted to the dignity of all life, people of good will strive to acknowledge and to defer to the interests and agency of others. In addition to an ethics of self-limitation and respect for others, people of good will also strive to address needs that others cannot meet for themselves. In an age of unjust distribution of material and social goods, people of good will change the world for better, within the limits of time, contingency, and finitude.
In addition to this tension between respecting and enhancing, Schweiker’s ethics also requires us to think in an integrated way about our actions. We live in a time when almost everything is related and interactive. Human action fans out in space and time. Moreover, the person of integrity wants her or his actions to be consistent and coordinate and to be shaped by sensitivity to and understanding of the relations and goods of life. Increasingly, humans see how complex are the relations of the community of life. The responsible person discerns actions that work creatively within that complexity.
Consider genetically modified crops and foods. An adequate ethics for transgenic agriculture should seek to integrate the various goods that interact with food production and should enable normative judgments where parts are rightly ordered to larger wholes. Because food is a basic human need, it enjoys a privileged status. Without nutritious food, a person cannot create music or cooperate with others. But persons do not live by food alone, and even food needs to be valued and ordered in light of other goods, human and nonhuman. For example, some analysts contend that future human food needs will not be met without transgenic agriculture—given changes in climate, populations, and diet. However, this agriculture will also involve the contamination of established landraces (traditional, non-hybrid plant strains) by transgenes, such as genes for pest resistance. This would be the loss of a good (biodiversity) for the sake of another (food sufficiency). But is this course of action really necessary? Are there other ways to advance both goods? Schweiker’s responsibility requires such questions because the integrity of the community of life is the good, not simply the good for humans.
Schweiker’s imperative of responsibility seeks to articulate in contemporary terms biblical commitments to justice, mercy, and humility before God. The moral integrity that responsibility seeks is comparable to biblical righteousness. I am persuaded on these points. But Schweiker’s imperative could benefit from some middle axioms or secondary principles. As Jesus saw the double love command as the sum of the Torah and the prophets, responsibility needs guidance about how we might respect and enhance the integrity of life in all actions and relations. In the social thought of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, one can find significant use of fours principles (participation, solidarity, sufficiency, and sustainability) that together embody an integrated ethics of responsibility. The ELCA to date has not embraced the principle of precaution—something noted in a recent social policy statement on genetically modified crops and foods. But perhaps the ELCA should—in response to Micah (6:8): to walk humbly with your God. Perhaps the principle of precaution adds complexity and rigor to our moral visions. I want now to explore this question, with reference to transgenic agriculture.
Transgenic agriculture is a major change in human practices with irreversible implications for life communities. While intended to be beneficial to all communities, this change will bring both predictable and unknowable risks of harm to planetary life. While risk is endemic to the human condition, it can and should be a matter of moral accountability and social control when possible and reasonable. No one disputes that risk of harm is a wrong-making feature of an act. The will to reduce risk of harm to affected beings and communities is part of what it means to respect others and the integrity of life. Due diligence in the assessment and reduction of risk is not easily determined or achieved. Concern about risk can be excessive and out of balance with other relevant moral norms. People can disagree about risk over matters of empirical belief as well as moral principle. Such conflicting judgments can also be subject to cultural conditioning and social location.
As Robert Paarlberg argues in The Politics of Precaution, questions of risk of harm and precaution constitute a moral fault line in differing societal responses to transgenic agriculture. While North Americans have embraced transgenics, Europeans have generally rejected them to date, and these differing moral stances have decisively informed governmental regulatory environments in these societies. In the United States, regulatory policy has been “relatively permissive,” while the European stance has been “precautionary.” Further, Paarlberg argues, this hardened moral impasse in the global North has influenced thinking and decisions in the South. While some variation exists, societies of the South have generally followed a more precautionary path.
Here critics of the European position wonder about a socioeconomic bias in this use of scientific skepticism. Does the fact that European societies are affluent and that food stocks are abundant there condition the question of tolerable risk? Two Danish advocates of human development, Per Pinstrup-Anderson and Ebbe Schioler (in Seeds of Contention ), take this view. In support of their thesis, an international survey of attitudes towards genetically modified crops in 34 countries shows a strong correlation between income levels and attitudes (U.S. and Canada excepted). Two-thirds of Europeans think that the benefits of genetically modified organisms are not worth the risks, while three-fifths of people in the Americas, Asia, and Oceania do. Africans are in the middle of these two groups. In general, people in poor countries view the benefits of transgenic agriculture to exceed the risks (FAO report, 2004 ).
Adjudicating and addressing such cultural difference is but one of several challenges of risk analysis, especially when questions of risk are adjudicated through democratic processes, as they ultimately should be. We know that natural and human communities possess resilience, the capacity to absorb shocks and to adapt to new conditions. But we can disagree about how fragile or robust these systems are and we can be risk-tolerant or risk-averse given different worldviews. What should humans do to adjudicate such difference? It would be nice if “science,” what is sometimes called “sound science,” could solve these thorny differences. But we are talking about a new class of human actions where science is both necessary for moral discernment but ultimately incapable of giving us the kind of relevant knowledge that we desire.
First, let us consider a definition of precaution and then we can return to this thought about novelty. There is no universal definition of precaution, and existing versions vary in their moral force. Recently, a nine-person commission created by UNESCO completed a sophisticated and balanced study of precaution and produced an excellent definition, building upon earlier work: “When human activities may lead to morally unacceptable harm that is scientifically plausible but uncertain, action shall be taken to avoid or diminish that harm.” Everything turns here, of course, upon how these terms are defined, and the UNESCO version defines its terms precisely and knowledgeably.
We need a precise definition because precaution covers only a limited class of human risk-taking actions—but an exceedingly important one. To quote UNESCO, “The [precautionary principle] applies to a special class of problems that is characterized by: (1) complexity in the natural and social systems that govern the causal relationships between human activities and their consequences and (2) unquantifiable scientific uncertainty in the characterization and assessment of hazards and risks. The existing decision-support tools to cope with risks in a rational way, such as probabilistic risk assessment and cost-benefit analysis, have limited value under these conditions.” (25).
In short, precaution as harm-avoidance is a fitting response to complex interactions and attendant uncertainty. Humans can make decisions under conditions of certainty, conditions of risk, and conditions of ignorance. Precautionary decisions occur under conditions of uncertainty. But importantly, such a response necessarily depends upon expert scientific judgment about complex systems, so called “systems science.” The determination of the question as one of uncertainty depends upon scientists. This is Jonas’ brave new technological world. In a world of uncertainty, we know some possible outcomes but cannot know the probabilities of the possibilities. This is not standard risk benefit analysis where good and bad outcomes can be predicted and subject to evaluation. In cases of uncertainty, we do not know enough to say which actions will most likely produce the greatest good.
At this point, we can see how pertinent the precautionary principle seems to be to new power that necessitates responsibility (quoting Jonas again ): “Knowledge … becomes a prime duty beyond anything claimed for it heretofore, and the knowledge must be commensurate with the causal scale of our action. The fact that it cannot really be thus commensurate, that is, that the predictive knowledge falls behind the technical knowledge that nourishes our power to act, itself assumes ethical importance. The gap between the ability to foretell and the power to act creates a novel moral problem. With the latter so superior to the former, recognition of ignorance becomes the obverse of the duty to know and thus part of the ethics that must govern the evermore necessary self-policing of our oversized might.” This is precisely what the precautionary principle asks to do—think about ignorance as a moral problem requiring a moral policy.
As I said, these are questions where the interests of natural and human communities depend, in part, upon scientists as scientists—who are also functioning on behalf of society as agents of moral discernment and judgment. For UNESCO, precaution applies (note the language) where “considerable” scientific uncertainties exist—about causality, magnitude, probability, the nature of harm; where the scenarios of harm are scientifically “reasonable;” where the uncertainties cannot be overcome in the short term given the complexities of the interactions; where the “plausible” potential harms are serious and irreversible; where there is a “need to act now” because counter-action in the future will be most difficult and/or costly. This is responsible agency, on a case-by-case basis, which only scientists can do.
Scientists are not the only social actors here. Following a pattern adopted by the European Commission, policy thinkers talk about three stage of precaution—trigger, decision, and application. Application can take several forms (no-go being just one). These three stages are all part of public, participatory space and demand responsible agency from all of us. Yet, the trigger stage relies upon scientific inquiry and science-based standards. We lay people must ultimately trust and defer to the scientific community. Public failure to do so, as in the case of United States policy on climate change, is a failure to live in Jonas’ world—which leads to me want to ask our scientists about the adequacy of this science-dependent view of ethics.
But first, a summary of the achievements of the principle. The precautionary principle acknowledges the complexity and variability of human relations to the world and embodies, perhaps, a new humility about scientific procedures and knowledge, a humility born of modern experience and of theoretical beliefs. Mindful of the actual magnitude of human power, the principle recognizes a new vulnerability of natural and human communities and puts the interests of those most affected over those who may benefit in the short term. Against the liberal technological imperative (“If it can be done, it should be done—or at least tried, and we’ll see what happens.”), the principle places new moral burdens of foresight upon those who wield technological power. The principle shows signs of an integrated ethics insofar as responsible action needs to be based upon consideration of all available alternatives. That means thinking long-term, systematically, and inclusively. The principle is creative because it promotes alternatives to potentially risky action. As a result, precaution inaugurates a slower technology that pays for change by attempting to avoid problems rather than fixing damage.
The precautionary principle seeks to resolve a crucial question about how persons should respond to novelty and uncertainty. All ethics need a policy on uncertainty, and the precautionary principle adopts the critical standards of scientific knowing to justify a low-risk stance. Precaution is a new morality, still in its infancy. The basic moral underpinnings are old—above all, do no harm, but the embrace of this norm for both intra-generational and inter-generational relations is new. The future on Earth counts—people of good will want to say. Human societies both local and global will need to sort out standards of reasonable precaution. But this assumes that the imperative of precaution as such is widely embraced. In the United States, a precautionary ethics does not enjoy support—which is largely why I chose to discuss it here today.
I know you will want to bring some questions back from the groups. But since I so rarely get to talk to scientists, please allow a couple closing questions. 1) Does the precautionary principle operate with an adequate understanding of scientific knowledge? If it is wrong about uncertainty, the principle fails. 2) If so, are there some obvious cases or contexts today where scientific uncertainty should trigger a decision about precaution? Climate change and genetically modified plants seem to be clear cases. Am I wrong? 3) The precautionary principle seems to call for a change in the careers of science and technology. Critics view the principle to be inherently biased against innovation—a risk-averse mentality for an era that knows and expects security and safety. Is the principle risk wise or risk foolish? Put in biblical terms, is precaution what it means today “to walk humbly with your God?”
Thank you for your attention. Have a good conversation.
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1 Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age, trans. Hans Jonas and David Herr (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), 8.
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/1124.ctl
2 http://www.unep.org/Documents.multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=78&ArticleID=1163
3 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology, www.unesco.org/shs/est publication The Precautionary Principle, Paris, March 2005, page 25. Copy available at: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0013/001395/139578e.pdf
4 Hans Jonas, op. cit., 1.
5 Hans Jonas, Ibid. 23.
6 Hans Jonas, Ibid., 5.
7 Hans Jonas, Ibid. 7-8
8 Philip Hefner, The Human Factor: Evolution, Culture, and Religion (Minneapolis. MN: Fortress Press, 1993), 152.
9 “We stand at a critical moment in Earth’s history, a time when humanity must choose its future. As the world becomes increasingly interdependent and fragile, the future at once holds great peril and great promise. To move forward we must recognize that in the midst of a magnificent diversity of cultures and life forms we are one human family and one Earth community with a common destiny. We must join together to bring forth a sustainable global society founded on respect for nature, universal human rights, economic justice, and a culture of peace. Towards this end, it is imperative that we, the peoples of the Earth, declare our responsibility to one another, to the great community of life, and to future generations.” Preamble, Earth Charter, http://www.earthcharter.org/files/charter/charter.pdf
10 Philip Hefner, op. cit., 264.
11 William Schweiker, Responsibility and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 125.
12 http://www.elca.org/dcs/elca_actions/gmo.html
13 http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title_pages/2789.html
14 http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title_pages/2322.html
15 http://www.fao.org/documents/show_cdr.asp?url_file=/docrep/006/y5160e/y5160e11.htm
16 UNESCO, op. cit., 25.
17 Hans Jonas, op. cit. 7-8.
18 UNESCO, op. cit., 31.