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 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 describe 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 (2021) and Steel and Bartha (2022). Traditional expected utility theory also comes as a special case of the model. Our proposal opens new perspectives for considering ethical dilemmas within a precautionary approach