The Culpability Principle
The needed cousin to the Precautionary Principle
You’ve heard of the Precautionary Principle, but we desperately need a new principle, one I will describe in this thread.
It’s called The Intervention Culpability Principle.
The Precautionary Principle is NOT that we should take precautions when there are perceived dangers.
Unfortunately, this is almost the exact opposite of what the Precautionary Principle actually says
The Precautionary Principle says that the burden of evidence is on those proposing the novel interventions to show that they will work, and will have low harms.
What’s the justification for the Precautionary Principle?
Society culturally evolves over time into somewhat optimal spots, with no designer behind it. When we make perturbations, it almost always shifts things from some current local optimum to something less optimal.
And there’s a long history of our human interventions wrecking things.
The greatest historical democides (mass deaths by government) are usually due to the results of society’s well intentioned policies.
So, that’s the what and why of the Precautionary Principle.
But I said we need another principle. What’s that?
Whereas the Precautionary Principle concerns how to behave BEFORE initiating novel interventions, this new principle concerns how to behave AFTER having implemented the novel interventions.
The baseline assumption in the mainstream covid narrative is that the interventions worked.
they slowed the spread
they saved hospitals
any costs were small relative to this
and they were certainly not the cause of most of the supposed covid deaths that the interventions were protecting us from
It’s been the skeptics and narrative outsiders that have been having to provide evidence, mostly ignored, that the interventions
did not slow the spread
did not save hospitals
had devastating harms
and are quite probably the principal cause of most of the supposed covid deaths that the interventions were supposedly protecting us from
That is to say, in the post-intervention situation we’re now in, the burden has been on those skeptical of the interventions to demonstrate the failure of the interventions.
Why is that?
That has things backwards.
Why isn’t the burden on those that supported the draconian civil-liberties-violating interventions to demonstrate that the interventions were in fact successful?
The wisdom of the Precautionary Principle is that, in the absence of very good arguments, we presume society’s current functioning has found some local optimum. Most deviations from that will lower the utility, often astronomically so.
And this is in the best of circumstances.
It’s even more relevant when interventions are implemented quickly, when civil liberties are violated, or when they’re implemented under a perceived pressure to “do something to save us.”
But those very reasons justifying the Precautionary Principle also argue that the post-intervention presumption should be that the interventions failed.
The presumption should definitely NOT be that the interventions worked as planned!
They rarely do work as planned, and those in power that implemented the interventions are exactly the folks you cannot trust when they claim they worked as planned, no matter how well intentioned they might be.
This is especially the case for interventions that were not implemented with an eye for the Precautionary Principle in the first place, as was the case for the covid interventions, where one was a “denier” to even suggest that cost-benefit analyses must be done.
So, just as the Precautionary Principle puts the burden on the interventionists before their implementation, this new principle puts the burden on the interventionists after the interventions have been implemented.
Here’s the new principle…
The Culpability Principle
The burden is on those supporting the novel interventions to show they worked as advertised.
It is the interventionists’ responsibility to fully and independently audit the consequences of the interventions, against the starting assumption that they did NOT work, and that they DID have significant harms.
And the Culpability Principle is even more relevant for interventions that
never took the Precautionary Principle seriously
were implemented in haste
were implemented in fear
were implemented with righteous justification
were perceived as “common sense”
violated civil liberties
For covid, the Culpability Principle says the burden is on the lockdowners (maskers, supporters of mandatory vaccination, etc.) to show that
the interventions slowed the spread
the interventions saved hospitals
any costs were small relative to the benefits
the interventions were certainly not the cause of most of the supposed covid deaths that the interventions were protecting us from
The Precautionary and Culpability Principles comprise the wisdom that our greatest threat comes from our own actions.
They’re just the pre- and post-game versions of the same core principle.
Precautionary Principle: The burden is on you to convince me 12 ways to Sunday that your ingenious scheme to save us ISN’T GOING TO royally fuck things up.
Culpability Principle: The burden is on you to convince me 12 ways to Sunday that your ingenious scheme to save us DIDN’T royally fuck things up.
But, some might reply, once the interventions have actually occurred, won’t it be obvious whether the interventions worked as advertised?
Not at all!
Not even supposing everyone is acting as independent and objective scientists.
And especially not in a climate where a mainstream narrative will inevitably have formed post-hoc justifying the wisdom and ethics of the interventions.
Both principles are also related to the Hippocratic Oath to “Do no harm,” except that the concern here is where the burden of evidence lies for those doing novel interventions.
In doctor terms…
The Precautionary Principle says,
“The burden is on the doctor to convince us that the novel medical intervention isn’t quack medicine or worse before it is administered.”
The Culpability Principle says,
“The burden is on the doctor to convince us that any harms coming after the novel medical intervention are not due to the failure of the intervention.“
Finally, as an addendum, because the Precautionary Principle is commonly misunderstood to dangerously mean the opposite — “We must take all the precautions!” — it would greatly help to rename these two principles as follows.
The Intervention Precautionary Principle
and the
The Intervention Culpability Principle
The Precautionary Principle’s cousin, the Culpability Principle. Moment 357
When we're talking about taking away inalienable rights and liberty from people as has been done in the name of a declared public health emergency we already have protections in our system of justice that guide rules of evidence that must be presented to deprive someone of their rights and liberty:
Burden of Proof
Cornell Law School
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/burden_of_proof
Preponderance of Evidence
Cornell Law School
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/preponderance_of_the_evidence
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
Cornell Law School
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/beyond_a_reasonable_doubt
Burden of Production
Cornell Law School
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/burden_of_production
Burden of Persuasion
Cornell Law School
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/burden_of_persuasion
The last one, Burden of Persuasion, is what government-directed censorship and propaganda is designed to impact. It's a prosecutor lying to a judge and jury with impunity in a courtroom where no defense to the charges is allowed.
Only by suspending the writ of habeas corpus can these evidentiary requirements be bypassed. And Habeas corpus doesn't get suspended on a whim. Even Pres. Bush's detention of terrorists in Gitmo was overruled by the courts who determined that foreign terrorists have evidentiary rights that must be recognized in order to suspend their rights and liberties by detention. It would seem to me that there is an existing legal framework to explicitly prohibit the types of encroachments on our inalienable rights and liberties we've suffered since 2020. We must lean into this framework and have our public policy reflect these same evidentiary requirements under public health emergencies that we require for national security emergencies. It's unconscionable that foreign terrorists have more recognized constitutional rights than US citizens.
The Suspension Clause (co-authored by Justice Amy Coney Barrett)
https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/articles/article-i/clauses/763
"The Clause does not specify which branch of government has the authority to suspend the privilege of the writ, but most agree that only Congress can do it. President Abraham Lincoln provoked controversy by suspending the privilege of his own accord during the Civil War, but Congress largely extinguished challenges to his authority by enacting a statute permitting suspension. On every other occasion, the executive has proceeded only after first securing congressional authorization. The writ of habeas corpus has been suspended four times since the Constitution was ratified: throughout the entire country during the Civil War; in eleven South Carolina counties overrun by the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction; in two provinces of the Philippines during a 1905 insurrection; and in Hawaii after the bombing of Pearl Harbor."
I’m sending this to Health Canada. I am utterly disgusted with Health Canada for launching this new attack against supplement companies. When I wrote asking for a list of dangerous supplement sold in Canada and how many adverse health events and deaths were associated they wrote back with a meaningless statement about how they are incorporating sustainable development in their absurd new requirements and that despite supplements being low risk they were assessing risk vs benefit to protect the health of Canadians. It’s straight out of the OneHealth biomedical security state model that biomedical and pharmaceutical companies are firmly in control of. Clearly our Health agencies are doing their bidding continuing the attack on alternative health. This One Health model is so intrusive and extensive you can be sure more inhumane atrocities are to follow if we are to go by what you have so aptly expressed here. Excellent!