Doxastic Precautionary Principle as Political Encroachment

This article aims to reconcile the intuitions grounding two important positions from the ethics of belief: epistemic purism and reason pragmatism. They can conflict, especially at the level of what we ought to believe all-things-considered. They manifest themselves in two important meta-principles that constrain law and policy-making that seem to be in tension as well. The first is the principle of evidence-based regulation, which says that legal rules should only be based on current scientific knowledge. The second is the precautionary principle, according to which authorities should regulate (or even prohibit) an activity that may cause harm to humans or the environment, even if there is insufficient scientific evidence to support such a claim. However, I argue that the precautionary principle can be interpreted from the perspective of ethics of belief as political encroachment on evidence-based regulation. As such, it can reconcile both the epistemic and pragmatic intuitions underlying these two principles.