Reasonable Precaution or Unjust Discrimination? Applying a Lexical Utility Model of the Precautionary Principle to Moral Choices

In some applications to human beings, the precautionary principle seems to raise specific ethical concerns. For instance, it has been used by a business owner in a court of justice to justify his refusal to hire applicants with a certain geographical origin for safety reasons. Or in public management, the precautionary principle has been used to exclude men who have sexual relations with men from donating blood on the basis of a higher HIV prevalence in this group. Does not the precautionary principle here amount to justifying a form of discrimination? To help analyze what is at stake from a decision-theoretic viewpoint and to consider the possibility of ethical catastrophes, we offer a lexical utility model of the precautionary principle, which generalizes a previous model by Bartha and DesRoches (Synthese 199:8701–8740, 2021), Steel and Bartha (Risk Anal https://doi.org/10.1111/risa.13892, 2022). Traditional expected utility theory also comes out as a special case of the model. Our proposal opens new perspectives for considering ethical dilemmas within a precautionary approach. It is intended to serve as a guiding tool for management teams in socially responsible companies, public institutions, and government agencies.