© Dr Tom Kerns
Emerging Environmental Epidemics: The Ethics of Poisoning
The facts
Approximately eighty thousand chemicals
that have been created since World War II are in common commercial
use today, and we add another thousand to that number every year.
The increasing use of toxics in consumer products and of pesticides
in our schools and public buildings leads to citizens' increasing
exposure to toxics in their air, water, food and consumer products.
As the production and use of toxics
in the world has increased, so also has the incidence of toxicant
induced illnesses increased. The increase in asthma and asthma
deaths, in the incidence of many cancers, chemical sensitivity
disorders, and endocrine system and reproductive disorders has
closely paralleled the increase in production and use of chemical
agents. Because toxic chemicals are found in new clothing, bedding,
soft furniture, office equipment, new carpeting, and in a wide
variety of building materials, it should come as no surprise
that human beings are exposed to more synthetic chemicals than
they have been exposed to in all history. As exposure to toxics
increases, so the incidence of toxicant induced pathologies increases.
How can the study of ethics help us understand what kind of policies would be best for regulating the manufacture and use of toxics?
Ethical principles
and human
rights
Two basic methods for approaching ethical decision-making have been defined in the history of western ethical thought. The utilitarian method attempts to weigh the anticipated future consequences, both good and bad, of an action, and then recommends the action that is expected to lead to the greatest benefits and the least costs. This is the sole method of decision-making used in the making of toxics policy in the US, and it is usually referred to as the practice of risk assessment.
The other method of ethical thinking, termed the deontological
method (from the Greek word for duty or responsibility), is usually
expressed in the form of commandments, laws, or formal documents.
The human rights tradition, with its formally stated human rights
documents, falls within the deontological method of ethical thinking.
The 1948 Universal
Declaration of Human rights, 1994 Draft
Declaration of Principles on Human Rights and the Environment
and the 1996 Charter
on Industrial Hazards and Human Rights are human rights documents
that formally address questions of toxics policy.
Current (risk assessment) methods for toxics policy in the US must be supplemented with a human rights (deontological) approach to toxics.
Modest proposals
For example, these documents and others express the conviction
that human beings have a right to available information about
toxic chemicals to which they are exposed. This right is not
currently implemented in US toxics policy. Chemical manufacturers
regularly deliberately conceal such information from the public.
People have a right to know when the schools, office buildings,
restaurants, grocery stores and other such public buildings will
be spraying pesticides into their indoor air. Even though most
public buildings and schools do spray pesticides regularly, the
public is not allowed to be informed about this.
These documents and others express
the conviction that school children have a right to not be exposed
to toxics in their schools; workers have a right to not be poisoned
in their places of employment; apartment dwellers have a right
to not be exposed to toxics against their will in their private
dwellings.
As Rachel Carson has said so well:
If the [US] Bill of Rights contains no guarantee that a citizen shall be secure against lethal poisons distributed whether by private individuals or by public officials, it is surely only because our forefathers, despite their considerable wisdom and foresight, could conceive of no such problem.
(These and other such human rights recommendations will be outlined in this section.)
Brick walls
When such modest proposals are recommended for implementation
into public policy, most people see the sense of them and readily
agree with them. The question thus arises as to why public policy
does not currently reflect these principles. What is standing
in the way?
This portion of the lecture discusses
some of the obstacles to implementing those rights, viz, the
financial interests of the multi-national chemical manufacturing
corporations, the power of the public relations firms that serve
them, the inertia that surrounds policymaking in any sphere,
and limitations in the current biomedical paradigm.
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