Re: [pf] "The New Uncertainty Principle"

by Betsy Barnum

12 December 2000 23:50 UTC

David A wrote:

> Are you really trying to argue that the invention/control of fire did
> not change human lives for the better??

No, of course not. My point was that by taking as his an example an extremely
fundamental discovery which quite clearly changed the course of human history
(cooking meat was just one relatively minor example of how fire changed
people's lives, then and now) he is implicitly equating *all* human innovation
to it in value and impact. Applying the precautionary principle to, say, new
robotic technology that puts people out of work, or a newly invented chemical
that makes some machine run more smoothly in some production process, is *not*
going to stifle human innovation and deprive humanity of major benefits. It's
a way of framing of the argument from the economic standpoint, rather than
from a broader standpoint of common sense and common good, and this is, in my
view, a faulty argument (and I think Mr. Morris knows it).

Betsy


--
Betsy Barnum
bbarnum@wavetech.net
http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/1624

**************************************
The key political values that emerge from the Constitution are frozen in the
ice of eighteenth-century elitism. We allow the privileged to rest comfortably
in a set of social relations that call exploitation freedom and the
empowerment of the rich democracy.

--Jerry Fresia, Toward An American Revolution