An Epistemic Analysis of the Precautionary Principle

In democratic societies restriction of persons’ freedom by the state or any legal authority is justified only in highly limited contexts and for strictly specified purposes. Among these, the first (and for liberalist thinkers, the only legitimate) one is the prevention of unacceptable harm to entities worth of protection. Violation of the privacy right in any form requires also a strong evidence basis that the person’s activity indeed leads to the expected harm. The causal link must be certain. The precautionary principle constitutes an amendment to this clause in that it relaxes the requirement of certain causal link in the face of relevant threat for the human or animal health or for the environment (see Jensen, 2002 for a theoretical and Di Fabio, 1994 as well as Kriebel et al., 2001 for a historical contextualization).