J. Britt Holbrook and Adam Briggle at the University of North Texas recently released a paper on the precautionary and proactionary principles. If you haven’t heard of either (or at least the second one), don’t worry. The paper, as I read it, focuses more on how each principle ought to be used, much more than on how they are used (they say as much at the beginning of section 2). While I am more interested in the later, I want to take the opportunity to try and articulate concerns I have with these principles that seem to me of a kind with other policy ‘principles’ that manage to hide as much, if not more, than they reveal.
First, the definitions.
The precautionary principle means that if there is a possible harm, but no scientific consensus on the nature of that harm, those seeking to act need to demonstrate an absence of harm before proceeding.
The proactionary principle, developed in opposition to the precautionary principle, means that in similar circumstances it is acceptable to proceed, while monitoring the possibilities for harm.
These principles, as currently understood, are too narrowly constructed to be terribly effective. The precautionary principle came up in the context of environmental and health concerns, and feeds into an anti-technology (or anti-innovation) perspective that prompted the proactionary principle. In a way, this assumes the object of these principles. The precautionary principle is presumed to be concerned with harms to people or the environment. The proactionary principle is presumed to be in favor of a technological solution to whatever the action is.
For something that is supposed to be dealing with conceptions of risk, I find this problematic. I think an essential follow-up to invocations of the precautionary principle (be they explicit or implicit) is to ask what might be harmed? For instance, the climate change debate could be characterized as arguing over who gets to invoke the precautionary principle – those seeking to protect the environment from harm or those seeking to protect the economy from harm. The debates over increasing the ability of people to control how information is collected about them online could be characterized in a similar fashion. There it’s those seeking to prevent harm to privacy and those seeking to prevent harm to current Internet business models.
Perhaps this concern comes from looking at the rhetorical/political strategies around science and technology choices, rather than how policies could be formed on the basis of these principles. I don’t know that the former precludes the latter, but I have a hard time envisioning how to decouple the rhetoric surrounding these principles from their policy utility. Holbrook and Briggle seem to make it look so easy, and I’ve missed how they managed it.
Pasco Phronesis 
No, David, you’ve hit on exactly the point we were trying to make. You cannot divorce these principles from the specific policy context, as if the principle will just make hard judgments for you (us). Instead, even if you adhere to one or the other principle, you still need to ask questions about how they ought to apply in a given context. The point is that the principles can serve at most a guiding role, rather than a role as decision procedures (in which one simply inserts the data and has the decision rendered without any thinking).
So the challenge here seems connected to the challenges presented by similar concepts that, in application, hide as much as they reveal in science policy. They would include the linear model, the Haldane principle, the rough division of science for policy and policy for science, and the old chestnuts of basic/applied/pure science.
If policymakers are looking to science and technology to rationalize faster paths to action, similar actions with science and technology policy concepts aren’t that out of place. But it means we have a high cognitive barrier to break through in order to get where you and Adam want to go.