Irreversible Foreclosure and the Allocation of Justificatory Burden in Governance beyond Epistemic Reach

Abstract

Governance of the relations between human activity and the wider natural and cosmic field operates under a scale relation that the governance of human affairs has generally been spared. The field within which the relations obtain substantially exceeds both the portion of it that becomes representable to any governing party and the portion of it that any governing party can modify. Existing responses to this relation are largely prohibitive in form. The epistemic tradition running from Hayek through Scott to Luhmann derives restraint from the limits of knowledge; the precautionary tradition derives it from the possibility of serious harm under uncertainty. This paper proposes a criterion that is procedural in form and narrow in trigger. Where a proposed intervention would irreversibly foreclose the generative capacity of trajectories other than the intervener's own, the burden of justification lies with the intervener; below that threshold, competing claims remain plural and are settled by ordinary political and legal means. The criterion is defended by an asymmetry argument, which generalises the quasi-option value of Arrow, Fisher and Henry from a resource to a relational capacity, and it is distinguished from the precautionary principle by two features: its trigger is irreversibility where the precautionary trigger is uncertainty, and its consequence is a dischargeable burden where the strong precautionary consequence is a bar. The paper then states the difficulty that bears most heavily against it. A sequence of individually reversible actions may accumulate to an irreversible foreclosure while every step carries a warrant, and the early-warning literature has itself established that certain classes of transition afford no detectable approach. The consequence drawn is that option preservation operates as the primary rule and that the governing rule is a function of the dynamical state of the system. Two matters are recorded as unsettled and are named as the subject of a companion paper: the authority competent to determine that a system has entered a critical state, and the distribution of the observational capacity on which any such determination depends.