Scruton on risk aversion

From How to Think Seriously About the Planet, in a chapter entitled “Radical Precaution.” Scruton is critiquing the precautionary principle, a principle as vague, irrational, and inevitably absolutist, favoring stifling schemes (summarized as “Don’t!”) to reduce already remote risks to zero, shrouding real crises in fogs of non-negotiable regulation that often prevent decisive action, “confiscating” problems from those directly affected by them and tasking detached and unaccountable international agencies with finding universally applicable solutions. Scruton provides several discouraging examples.

Worse are the precautionary principle’s effects when it trickles down from being the guiding idea of governments and activists to being the way ordinary people approach the decisions they make in their lives. Scruton, arguing from experience, describes the breakdown of real communities and relationships wrought by the absolute Don’ts created by precautionary regulatory programs.

Building on those examples and elaborating upon those worries, Scruton writes, in response to arguments in favor of the precautionary principle based on the prioritization of needs over wants or desires, a prioritization that favors “a ‘heuristics of fear’, always focusing on worst-case scenarios and the costs that we might endure, rather than the benefits, however great, that might otherwise cast them in shadow,” that:

Distinguishing needs from desires is simply one part of the process of weighing reasons. And we should be clear that we do, in our ordinary reasoning, bargain with both life and need, and that the attempt to prevent this is rarely successful. Human beings risk their lives in skiing, hunting, driving and competitive sport; they happily exchange health for whisky and safety for love; they leap to the defence of their family and their country and throw caution to the winds. And sometimes they are prepared to risk the end of everything, in defence of a way of life that they refuse to jettison. The prefect of a Roman city besieged by Vandals or Huns would often choose to resist rather than surrender, even though the cost of failure would be total destruction, and the cost of surrender a negotiable servitude. We do not regard the choice as irrational, or as an immoral imposition on the citizens for whom the prefect stood as guardian. Indeed, we look with suspicion on those who are unwilling to risk death in defence of a shared way of life, and we recognize sacrifice as a fundamental component in the resilience of human communities. The Roman Empire lasted because it schooled its citizens in sacrifice; and the principle that governed the beleaguered cities was not ‘to save everything, risk nothing’, but ‘to save the best things, risk everything’. We should not, therefore, ring-fence our needs and our lives from the business of risk-taking. Whatever we do, the risk of death—our own death, but also the death of those who depend on us and whom we are duty-bound to protect—is real, however small. And to forbid us to bargain with this risk, as we bargain with all others, is to deprive us of our most important weapon in confronting it. Indeed, rational beings, it seems to me, can flourish only when they have risks to confront and responsibilities to assume. The risk-free life is not a life in which we are or can be fulfilled. Any pattern of thought that seeks to extinguish risk and to lift our responsibilities in the face of it is, therefore, one that threatens a primary human need.

I can’t remember where, but several times I’ve heard people say something like: “Sociology has spent the last fifty years proving that everything your grandmother said was true.” I see two grandma sayings in the passage above: “Need ain’t the same as want” (or one of a thousand variations on that theme), which is indisputably true, but when elevated to an absolute, universal guiding principle “throws the baby out with the bathwater.”

We live in an increasingly risk-averse culture (sometimes, as now, for good reasons), and Scruton’s counterpoint, coming back as he so often does to the nature of persons and their lives in community, is welcome food for thought.