Abstract

This paper challenges Gardiner’s (2006) contention that his Core Precautionary Principle (CPP) “tracks our [precautionary] intuitions about some core cases, including the paradigmatic environmental ones”. And instead sketches a handful of precautionary practices in navigational systems that (collectively) do better at tracking these “intuitions”. There is no way of measuring these diverse practices as to relative weakness or strength against each other. And ultimately it makes little sense to talk about precautionary principles on any strength scale—as Gardiner (2006) aspires to do (and in such a way as locates CPP firmly in the middle). Indeed, it makes little sense to proclaim that precaution can be captured in any one decision rule or formula because, as will be illustrated here, precaution is many nonoverlapping things, each of which is appropriate in different stages of the navigation process, from confrontation of a dilemma to ultimate resolution of it.