Considering Ihtiat in its Feqh jurisprudence as the Bioenvironmental Precautionary Principle

In modern world, the human beings have succeeded in winning themselves an optimal grade of comfort with the progresses made in science and industry, but at the cost of losing comfort in the environment. The world has lost its prior security in the uproars of technology and rapid changes that have come about accordingly and the legislators are subsequently seeking to enact regulations that safeguard the public interests against these dangers. The precaution principle is now elapsed almost five decades since it was first applied as an independent principle. However, there are such basics in our regulations as no-loss axiom and the logical-canonical principle of foresight that are capable of filling the gap that has emerged in the absence of precaution principle; but, legalization of the precaution principle can create positive waves in psychological terms thereby to provide the legislator with wider array of options in approving supportive rules through replacing the compensatory liabilities by the preventive provisions. In the present article, we have made efforts to compare the jurisprudential principle of foresight with its western counterpart so as to figure out their similarities and differences thereby to evaluate the feasibility of inventing a principle of precaution based on the jurisprudential-legal premises of our country. Now that many of the regulations passed in Iran are found residing in the neutral part of the canonical rules, it seems better to accept the precaution principle as a logical tenet and put it into practice with protection of the environment and the mankind.