The political leeway in policymaking: from Neurathian underdetermination to the precautionary principle

Key Points

The Auxiliary Principle emphasizes the inherent political leeway in policymaking under uncertainty, promoting responsibility in choices.
Otto Neurath's concepts on epistemic uncertainty and an auxiliary motive inspire the development of the Auxiliary Principle.
This theoretical model evaluates decision-making processes, aiming to clarify responsibilities in democratic contexts.
It argues for the Auxiliary Principle as a viable alternative to the Precautionary Principle, particularly in health regulation debates.

Abstract

In this paper, I propose and develop the Auxiliary Principle (AP), which states that given the endemic uncertainty in policymaking, decision-makers always have political leeway in their choices, and that they should a cknowled geit as such. First, I explain the ideas of Otto Neurath, whose writings on decision-making in conditions of epistemic uncertainty and whose proposal of an ‘auxiliary motive’ inspired my AP. Next, I explain the AP in-depth, including what its assumptions are and what its purpose is in decision-making under uncertainty: making the responsibility of political decision-making explicit in democratic discourse. Finally, I argue that the AP can be a useful substitution for the popular Precautionary Principle at the meta-level while preserving its risk-averse intuitions. I use the controversy around the regulation of the AstraZeneca vaccine for Covid-19 to illustrate my arguments.

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The political leeway in policymaking: from Neurathian underdetermination to the precautionary principle

Key Points

Abstract

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