Scienza e diritto. Riflessioni sul principio di precauzione

In the modern age, the differentiation between social systems on the basis of a specific function has led to the establishment of a series of systems, including a system of law and one of science. Moreover, the essential traits of these two systems have gradually undergone profound change: law has tended increasingly towards positivism and science has expanded the field of its application, though at the price of transforming its certainties into probabilities. These transformations have also affected how science and law relate to one another, as science is no longer capable of offering law any precostituted truths, while law is obliged to decide what science is incapable of knowing. When this expectation that this it is possible to legislate for everything runs into the risks intrinsic in new technologies, it reacts by elaborating new legal categories, such as the principle of precaution, which is particularly effective in enabling technological risks to be distributed and the traditional models of political decision-making to be subjected to problematic reappraisal.