One of the most is characteristic aspects about risk decisions is that the information at the time of decision will always be incomplete. The other most characteristic aspect is that of possible harmful outcomes. It therefore seems sound to adopt some kind of precautionary concern to risky choices. However, precaution is normally taken to relate to ex ante safety concerns, that of avoiding foreseeable harmful outcomes or mitigating their effects. This paper argues that we could adopt a broader view of precaution. Besides the standard view of precaution aimed at safety, there are two other kinds of uncertainties discussed in the literature: epistemic uncertainty and moral uncertainty. This would give us three kinds of precautionary concerns. Safety precaution would suggest that we seek to avoid risks above a certain threshold. Epistemic precaution would suggest that we seek to avoid risks when too much remains unknown. Moral precaution would suggest that we avoid risks that are too uncertain from a moral perspective. To these three kinds of precautionary concerns, we could add a fourth kind of worry: What if we severely misjudge the risks or things develop in alarming ways? The last kind of precaution thus concerns the possibilities of rectifying, or retracting from, previous risk decisions. This kind of Reparative precaution suggests that we only impose risks that stand in some kind of proportion to what we could hope to rectify in case all goes wrong or allows for retreat should we need to change plans.
