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Many food products contain genetically modified corn and soybeans. Corn plants are modified to resist pests, and soybean plants are modified to tolerate herbicides. In the United States food labels need not indicate genetically modified ingredients. In the European Union they must. Scientific data supports the safety of genetically modified food, but consumers may want to exercise caution. What principles should guide a government's regulation of food labels? The popular Precautionary Principle is too single-minded to be a reliable source of sound judgment. This chapter proposes a more thorough principle grounded in decision theory. It relies on cost-benefit analysis formulated comprehensively to assess a regulation's consequences, including reduction of risks. Made comprehensive, cost-benefit analysis absorbs plausible versions of the Precautionary Principle and wisely guides regulation.

This chapter identifies two very different paradigm cases for the Precautionary Principle that define two separate versions of the principle: the deliberative and the epistemic. I argue that the deliberative version should not be identified with the maximin principle but rather be interpreted as an output filter that transforms the original description of a case into a new case in which all options that may lead to outcomes below a certain threshold are omitted. The epistemic version is a cluster of at least three different epistemic principles, which are introduced and defined by matching paradigm cases. By distinguishing between all these versions of the Precautionary Principle many of the objections that have been raised against it can be rebutted.

Climate change has become a reality, and much research on its causes and consequences is currently conducted. To our knowledge, very little attention has been paid to epistemological issues raised by climate change research. Randomized experiments cannot of course be done, so that climate change research needs to be observational, usually spanning over many decades or centuries. The amount and quality of information is often limited, at least as far as extrapolation to the remote past or future is concerned. In general causality assessment poses special problems, both in attributing meteorological events like tornados to man‐made climate change, and in attributing health effects to meteorological changes. We exemplify some of the major epistemological challenges in this chapter. This chapter stresses that climate change leads to extreme consequences the application of the Precautionary Principle: the consequences of certain forecasts would be so devastating (e.g. the melting of permafrost, that would free enormous quantities of CO₂) that we have to act to prevent them, though their likelihood is extremely low. The usual balancing of the seriousness of the consequences vs. their likelihood of occurrence becomes very challenging.

Governments regulate risks on behalf of the people they serve. Given that regulatory agencies aim for regulatory measures that the public would endorse if rational and informed, the mean-risk method of evaluating acts provides valuable guidance. It offers a way of constructing for a citizen informed probability and utility assignments for a regulation’s possible outcomes, and using these assignments to obtain for the citizen an informed utility assignment for the regulation. The theory of cooperative games combines the utility assignments of multiple agents to support a collective act, and under simplifying assumptions, supports an act that maximizes collective utility, defined as a sum of the act’s utilities for the agents, in the tradition of utilitarianism. This approach to regulation accommodates acts targeting information-sensitive, evidential risks as well as acts targeting physical risks. Verification of a reduction in an evidential risk can meet the standards of objectivity that the law adopts.

While U.S. federal chemical policy development largely ceased after 1980, major developments occurred in other countries and internationally. In 2006 the European Union significantly overhauled the chemical policies of its twenty-six member counties. This new regulation required registration and full chemical information dossiers on all 143,000 chemicals manufactured and used in Europe and government authorization of those chemicals of very high concern. Since then, several Asian countries have passed new laws to harmonize with the new European standards. Meanwhile, several new treaties have been negotiated by the United Nations to manage chemicals in global chemical markets.

This chapter defines epistemic privilege in environmental controversies. It also discusses the role of science in policy making and brings up questions about the influences of power in discursive practice. Included is an overview of the precautionary principle, and of the production of peer reviewed research.

Italy’s Valentino Rossi is the most popular motorcycle racer of his day. This chapter examines Rossi’s dominance in motorsport, while also providing the reader with a broad understanding of motorsport, as well as the risk involved in motorsport. Rossi has served as an international ambassador for his sport, helping to popularize motorcycle racing around the globe.