Climate scientists agree almost unanimously that climate change (CC) is a reality of today’s world. If its trend is not dampened soon by policy measures they further agree that CC will put people around the globe at grave risk. Among some of its consequences are an increased likelihood of ‘Freak weather events’ like storms and heatwaves occurring, rising sea-levels that will flood vulnerable coastal areas and increased drought hitting other areas of the world. If we want to eliminate these risks we had better implement some precautionary measures. The question is however, which measures are both adequate and acceptable to implement?
The ‘precautionary principle’ (PP) found in environmental law might be helpful in deciding which measures are appropriate. Its formulations and consequently interpretations are, however, manifold. Therefore we arguably have to enlist further criteria to interpret the PP and perhaps even come up with a new formulation. This paper focusses on the first issue: finding criteria to correctly interpret the PP. These criteria were yielded from a comparison of three traditional ethical theories utilitarianism, deontology and virtue-ethics that present their own criteria for choosing a right course of action or attitude. The following formulation of the PP was chosen to apply these criteria to: when substantial evidence indicates that an activity threatens human health or the environment, take precautionary measures to prevent or reduce such harm, even if some of the cause-and-effect relationships are not well established, scientifically.
The paper concludes that Virtue-Ethics yields the most helpful criteria to interpret the PP with. It gives us a set of principles, or rather virtues, to judge the morality of our interpretation by and it focuses on our attitude towards a world at risk rather than requiring the nigh impossible prediction of risks and the success of their proposed preventions. The other two ethical traditions are believed to fail to give us enough guidance to interpret the PP. They both require this tough prediction of risks and success of preventions to judge the morality of our interpretation by. Moreover they provide us with one single principle to guide our actions and if this principle stops to be action-guiding we would arrive at an impasse. The downfall of utilitarianism specifically is that its main principle of ‘maximising utility/happiness’ can lead to promoting ultimately detrimental actions, specifically regarding balancing our current needs and those of future generations (FGs). For deontology the largest obstacle particular to this tradition would be dealing with conflicting pieces of precautionary advice, since a criterion of deontology is that the duties that govern your actions should be non-contradictory.
