It is the job of philosophical ethics to provide standards that help us identify what ought to be done. Utilitarianism: One way to think about "the ought" is through the lens of utility , which looks at various options for action, asking who will be affected and to what extent each stakeholder will be benefited or harmed.
In the utilitarian view, an ethical action is the one that produces the greatest balance of good over harm or the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Regarding research in human molecular genetics, for example, the utilitarian might argue that the potential benefit of relieving human suffering outweighs the possible dangers of manipulating human genes and evolution through germ-line intervention.
Rights: A different approach presumes that what makes human beings more than mere things is our ability to choose freely what type of lives to lead and the right to have our choices respected. This view from rights describes an ethical action as that which protects people from being used in ways that they do not choose.
Importantly, each human has a right not to be treated as means to another's end, even an undeniably good end. The right not to be used encompasses other rights: the right to be told the truth, the right to privacy, and the right not to be harmed are among those particularly relevant to biotech research and genetic medicine. For example, respecting rights may set limits on human subject research in molecular genetics by requiring adequate informed consent including an honest assessment of risks and benefits, or it may require that experimental gene transfer therapy be undertaken only as a last resort.
In this view, actions that violate individual or human rights are wrong. The justice approach to ethics is rooted in the principle of "treating equals equally and unequals unequally. For example, when two runners cross the finish line at the same time, it is unfair to award the blue ribbon to Jeff and not to Jake unless, for example, Jake has cheated. The primary form of justice in medicine and medical research is distributive justice , which is concerned with the fair distribution of benefits and burdens across society.
Distributive justice seeks clarity regarding those aspects of individuals and society that may justify drawing distinctions in how benefits and burdens are allocated. That is, it seeks to identify under what conditions treating unequals unequally would be justified. Such material conditions could include distribution based on determinations of need, social worth, contribution, or effort.
For example, the principle of need would support mechanisms for providing access to cutting-edge treatments to all who would tangibly benefit irrespective of their ability to pay for them. A principle of contribution might suggest that a family who sponsored research into an illness might have more influence on the direction of the research and greater access to its fruits than the rest of us. The common good rests on a vision of society in which all people join in the pursuit of shared values and aims.
Because individual good is inextricably woven into the good of the whole community, pursuing the common good includes creating a set of general conditions that are equally to everyone's advantage. Together with respecting individual rights and freedoms, the common good approach requires that common goals, such as human health and well being, be pursued through biotech innovation and a stable health care infrastructure.
A consideration of virtue assumes that certain ideals allow for the full development of our humanity. A person who has inculcated these core ideals, or virtues, will do what is right when faced with an ethical choice. Virtues are dispositions that facilitate acting in ways that develop human potential and allow human flourishing. Virtues are good habits in that they are acquired through repetition and practice and, once acquired, they become characteristic of a person.
Honesty, integrity, prudence, courage, wisdom, and compassion are examples of virtues. Once a person has developed a virtuous character, his or her inclination is to act in ways consistent with ethical principles. In much the same way as Barry Bonds is inclined to hit home runs, the virtuous person will be inclined to tell the truth and act with compassion and courage.
Virtue ethics, with the emphasis on character and ideals, captures the idea of "the good scientist"—intelligent, honest, compassionate, determined—much more so than the principle-based approaches of utility, justice, and rights. The development of pharmaceuticals for "compassionate use" echoes an ethics of virtue.
Reasoning into Biotech Practice Those five approaches suggest that biotech ethics should ask five questions. Putting It Together This framework for ethics does not offer an easy or automatic solution to ethical dilemmas. That is not its goal. The framework helps identify what ethics requires of us: to consider benefits and burdens, rights and justice, virtues and the common good.
Each of these approaches gives us key information about ethical options in a given situation. In the end, each of us brings our moral judgment to bear in carefully considering the facts of the matter and what is right-making and wrong-making about our options for acting. Prior to , crop biotechnology was not widely associated with environmental impacts on wilderness or endangered species. In that year news reports that Bt-crops could affect monarch butterflies enlivened the prospect of unintended impact on nontarget species for the first time.
This has awakened public recognition of the way that agricultural biotechnology could have an impact on wild species, and provides an example of how eco-centric environmental impacts could be brought about by genetic agricultural technologies. In Canada, genetically engineered canola could outcross with wild rape. Research on genetically engineered fish have long been associated with the potential for negative impact on wild populations. There are also less well known products, such as recombinant vaccines, that could also have negative impact on wild habitat.
Since those who argue most strongly for an eco-centric approach to environment generally reject the idea that benefits to humans could compensate for harmful impacts on wild species and ecosystems, the potential for this type of impact raises the possibility of a new kind of argument against agricultural biotechnology. Attentiveness to potentially catastrophic risk and to preservation of farmland has created a groundswell of environmentally based concern about agricultural biotechnology in Europe.
It is not clear that this concern is grounded on a particularly well-informed appreciation of the likely consequences of adopting genetically engineered crops. Nevertheless, the cultural difference between Europeans and North Americans is striking, and Europeans do appear to have an ethically coherent set of concerns in mind.
They question whether global society is sufficiently committed to addressing the challenges of catastrophic risk, and they value traditional rural areas and farming practices as components of nature preservation. It is possible that the strength of European environmental concerns will stimulate new levels of environmental concern in North America.
Critics of food and agricultural biotechnology may link the need for ethics with a concern for food safety. This is, on the one hand, quite understandable, since if one already believes that eating so-called GMOs--the acronym is short for "genetically modified organisms," or the products of food and agricultural biotechnology--could be dangerous, one is also very likely to believe that it is unethical to put people in a position where they might eat them, especially without their knowledge.
On the other hand, those who advocate on behalf of agricultural biotechnology take great offense at this characterization of ethics, since it implies that they are exposing the unwitting public to grave dangers without their knowledge. In fact, what is at issue between critics and advocates of biotechnology is not really a question of ethics. Both would agree that it would be very unethical to expose people to food borne hazards without their knowledge.
The source of their disagreement is whether there are hazards associated with the human consumption GMOs, or if harms are theoretically possible, the likelihood that any potential hazards will actually manifest themselves in the form of an injury to human health. The philosophical, statistical and scientific issues that arise in any attempt to sort out the grounds for such disagreements go well beyond the scope of the present paper. Readers are encouraged to consult the CBAC paper on food safety.
Nevertheless, there are some ethical issues that can be associated with food safety. One ethical issue concerns the question of what a company or government food safety regulator should do when there are disagreements of the sort just mentioned. One possible answer is that the decision should be based on the best available science. The ethical rationale for this approach presumes that GMOs have benefits of some sort, if only the potential to increase the cost-efficiency of crop production and build wealth for farmers and seed companies.
If so, it would be ethically wrong to prohibit GMOs without some sort of evidence that they pose a hazard to human health. If one allowed baseless concerns to stifle innovation, the result would be technological and economic stultification that is not in the public interest. This approach does require criteria for deciding when an alleged hazard is baseless, and "the best available science" is supposed to provide a risk based approach discussed below in Section 4.
Philosophers of science have long recognized that science is not value-free, and Brunk, Haworth and Lee have shown how values permeate risk analysis as it is developed to support criteria for the evaluation of potential hazards.
As already noted, this is not an appropriate context to delve into these issues. Even a cursory discussion of them would tax the patience of the most committed lay reader, though it is certainly important for the scientists who must make these judgments to be well versed in the value dimensions of risk analysis. The practical implication is that if companies and government agencies are to adopt a risk based approach, it is essential that the public be able to place their trust in science.
That is the topic of Section 5 in this report, and the connection between food safety and trust in science is one reason why public confidence in science is relevant to the ethics of agricultural biotechnology. Even under the best circumstances of strong scientific consensus on hazards, this approach to food safety suffers from some of the problems often associated with the utilitarian or consequentialist form of ethical reasoning with which it is closely allied see the discussion in Section 4.
Any approach to ethics that rationalizes some chance of a hazardous outcome in terms of benefit to the general public will be vulnerable to criticisms that stress individual rights. The widely discussed risk of allergenicity associated with GMO's is an instance of this problem. Since genes make proteins and proteins are potential allergens, one cannot exclude the possibility that genetic engineering of foods may introduce proteins into foods that will cause sensitivities and allergic reactions in some portion of the population.
Since food allergies are not well understood, and since they may affect very small percentages of the population, it may not be practical to anticipate or characterize the likelihood of allergic reactions before GMOs are released for public consumption.
Thus, there may be a few people who would be harmed by eating a GMO, and the approach to food safety described above seems to rationalize a small probability of serious health affects on these few in terms of economic benefits to the many. One may be inclined to think that individuals have an inviolable right not be harmed by inadvertently consuming a protein that they could not have known they were allergic to, and that this right is violated even when the risk is purely hypothetical.
One way to characterize this type of thinking is to say the rights of the few outweigh less vital interests of the many. Some opponents of biotechnology may wish to take this position. The most obvious alternative is to place each individual in a position to look after their own interests where food safety is concerned. This approach follows the ethical logic of informed consent: people should be free to take whatever risks they choose, but they should not be put in a position of risk without adequate notification and an opportunity to choose otherwise.
This sort of reasoning has led many to demand labels for GMOs, a response that will be discussed in more detail in section 4. However, the informed consent approach to food safety has drawbacks, as well. For one, empirical research demonstrates that few people make effective use of detailed food information, nor do people generally desire such information. It may be impossible to provide the information that allows one person to make an informed choice without simultaneously putting another person in a position where they will make an uninformed choice.
As such, some argue that governments should be judicious and sparing in the information that they require to be supplied to consumers, and this argument effectively brings us back to the "best scientific evidence" perspective described already. Genetic transformation and cloning of livestock is currently in the experimental stage.
However, survey research indicates that animal biotechnology is strongly associated with ethical concern among members of the public. There are also a number of authors associated with social movements to protect animals who have decried food and agricultural biotechnology see Fox, , , ; Linzey, ; Ryder, However, other authors who have argued strongly for recognition of animal interests have not found gene technology to be especially problematic see Rollin, ; ; Varner, Clearly some of those who find animal genetic engineering problematic are among those who see gene technology as intrinsically wrong.
This area of ethical concern has been discussed above. There are two additional issues associated with gene technology applied to animals. The first is that gene technologies have the potential to produce suffering in animals. The second is whether or not it is acceptable to reduce an animal's capacity to suffer as a means to reduce suffering.
Some of the first genetically engineered animals were very dysfunctional see Rollin, , and there continue to be questions about the health of cloned animals though the evidence currently suggests that they do not have abnormal health problems. Animals have not always and everywhere been thought to have moral standing that would make their suffering a matter of ethical concern. Nevertheless, few in Western industrial democracies would deny that animals are capable of feeling pain, and few would deny that humans have a responsibility to ensure that animals do not suffer gratuitously.
The ethical issue here is thus whether the purposes to which animals are being put justifies any pain and suffering they experience. Although this is an ethical issue of general interest and importance, its bearing on the ethical acceptability of food and agricultural biotechnology should not be overstated.
No genetic transformation that would result in genetically engineered or cloned animals enduring greater suffering than ordinary livestock is being proposed. Rollin has argued for an ethical principle that would proscribe any such application of biotechnology. To the extent that existing practices within livestock production are ethically acceptable with respect to their impact on farm animals, practices associated with food and agricultural biotechnology should also be acceptable. Of course, existing practices are the subject of intense criticism by animal advocates, and arguments that follow the principle stated in the preceding paragraph have already been controversial.
For example, recombinant bovine somatotropin rBST , a product of genetically engineered bacteria that stimulates dairy production, has been controversial because cows with higher rates of milk production are also at a higher risk for health problems. The U. Food and Drug Administration chose to interpret the animal health risk from use of rBST as consistent with that of existing practices, since there are other legal ways for boosting milk production.
Critics chose to interpret the same data as evidence that rBST increases the risk of health problems in animals on which it is used see Powell and Leiss, for a discussion of the Canadian debate on rBST. There is thus a real prospect that animal advocates will interpret the animal health risks associated with gene technology as having greater ethical significance than that of existing technology.
The second set of ethical issues associated with animal biotechnology were first clearly stated when Rollin suggested that genetic engineering should be used to render animals being used in medical experiments "decerebrate"--physically incapable of experiencing pain This general approach could be applied in a less drastic fashion to livestock.
Gene technology could be used to produce animals that are more tolerant of the crowding and confinement that create welfare problems in existing animal production systems. Many animal advocates find this to be an abhorrent suggestion, though it has proved difficult to articulate reasons that do not revert back to the kind of animal telos arguments that were noted in section 1. The way that biotechnology interacts with social justice revolves around the way that specific products affect economies of scale in farming or food distribution, and the control that different actors [4] maintain with respect to the overall food system.
Certainly any technology has these effects, including not only such obviously agricultural technologies as plant breeding or chemical pesticides, but also information technologies such as the internet and basic infrastructure such as roads and transport.
How do technological changes pose challenges of social justice with respect to farming communities? Perhaps more than any of the other ethical concerns discussed in this paper, food and agricultural biotechnology represent nothing more than a case study for this general question. From one point of view, it is either mistaken or unfair to focus attention on food and agricultural biotechnology's consequences for farming communities.
This focus might be mistaken in that other technologies may be making a larger contribution to the social changes of concern to critics of biotechnology see Thompson, It might also be unfair in that it exploits concern about safety and environmental issues to promote an ethical and political agenda that the broader public does not support.
Social critics respond to these points by noting that the actors promoting agricultural biotechnology are well-financed, enjoy considerable political power and are capable of moving the technology forward without addressing issues of social justice to farming communities see Jamieson, There is no element in the debate that is uncontested.
Those who have raised issues of justice for farmers and farming communities have based their concerns on many different ethical claims. Some of the arguments have a history that extend back to the origins of the industrial revolution; others exemplify social concerns uniquely characteristic of the late twentieth century. In assessing long-running historical arguments, it will be useful to trace the way that agricultural technologies have played a key role throughout history.
It is plausible to see late twentieth-century themes that link opposition to science and technology and movements of social liberation as building on these long running historical arguments. Some of the foundational arguments for contemporary discussions of social justice achieved some of the most influential formulations during 17 th and 18 th century debates over agricultural land reform.
Developments in transport technology and infrastructure made it feasible for farmers and landowners to seek competitive prices for grain. This practice sparked additional innovations such as enclosure and increased use of draft animals that increased yields. It also disrupted the system of tithes and shares that had been the foundation of feudal and village economies.
On one side of the political dispute that emerged from this technological change were those who developed a two-stranded argument. A People who invest labor in the production of goods have the right to seek the most favorable price for their goods; and B the increased efficiency of technological innovation served all in the long run--technological innovations promote the greatest good for the greatest number. On the other side were those who argued that these transformations destroyed the integrity of village communities.
They argued that the older system of exchange, in which every person in the village was entitled to a share of the local crop, better satisfied the ethical demands of social justice see Thompson, ; Montmarquet, The ethical issues associated with early transformation of rural areas in Europe were generalized and evolved into general views on social justice during the 19 th and 20 th centuries.
Arguments that favored agricultural technology eventual took shape as the neo-liberal principles endorsing the social efficiency of unregulated markets, on the one hand, and the sanctity of private property, on the other.
Arguments opposing technological improvement of agricultural production and rural infrastructure evolved into socialist and communitarian conceptions of social justice. The anti-technology dimension of these arguments was gradually muted, particularly in strong leftist and Marxist interpretations of social justice.
Marx believed strongly in the power of technological development as a force of liberation. There is thus a sense in which some of the broadest concepts of social justice have their roots in disputes over agricultural technology.
Disputes over agriculture and rural development continued throughout the 20 th century, but participants in these debates were not particularly mindful of their historical origins. It is useful to isolate three themes. First, new agricultural technology had its greatest effect on rural communities in industrial societies during the 20 th century and especially after World War II. This created a century long debate over the ethical and political wisdom of allowing industrial principles to shape agricultural production, vs.
The debate involves layers of dispute over facts, social theory and policy potential. The ethical dimension consists in the claim on one side that technological innovations adopted by profit seeking farmers, processors and food retailers reduce overall food costs, resulting in consumer benefits that outweigh the financial and psychological costs of those who suffer economic reverses.
On the other side it is claimed that the economic opportunity represented by family farms and the small businesses that arise to support them is the essential component of social justice. Furthermore it is claimed that small-scale rural communities promote participatory local governance and are therefore most consistent with the ethical principle that social justice depends upon consent of the governed. It was virtually inevitable that any new agricultural technology developed in the last quarter of the twentieth century would be subsumed by this debate.
Some of the first social science publications on food and agricultural biotechnology framed it in precisely the terms of the century long debate over the structure of agriculture and the ethical importance of the family farm. A second strand of ethical concern over social justice examined the impact of food and agricultural biotechnology in developing countries.
Here, too, there was an ongoing debate over the "Green Revolution" agricultural development policies being pursued by organizations such as the World Bank, FAO, the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, the Rockefeller Foundation and the international development agencies of industrialized nations.
Here, too, it was inevitable that biotechnology would be subsumed by the existing debate. As above it is argued that the benefits of increased food production outweigh any short run reverses suffered by individual farmers. Indeed, given the threat of famine, it is argued that the social demand for more food production is compelling.
Those holding an opposing view raise factual questions about the success of the Green Revolution. The ethical dimension of their viewpoint notes that the infusion of technology and capital into peasant economies and traditional agricultural production systems causes an upheaval in the existing social relations. In addition to claiming that this upheaval destroys the culture and way of life in traditional societies, critics of Green Revolution-style development note that the poorest of the poor are the most vulnerable when such massive transformations of social structure occur.
They counter the argument that food needs in the developing world override concern for cultural integrity with an argument that appeals to the basic rights of individuals whose lands, jobs and way of life are destroyed in the wake of development projects.
The rights argument claims that it can never be acceptable to treat individual rights as a social cost that must be paid in order to achieve benefits for the majority.
A third strain of argument also focuses on issues relating to international development, and is closely related to the previous one. Much of world's most valuable plant genetic resources lie in the territory of developing countries, and much of it is found in land-races.
Land races are crop varieties that have been grown by indigenous farmers who have selected for valuable traits by a process of trial and error.
Developed country plant breeders have made many advances by extracting these valuable traits from the seeds of land races. In the past, neither the indigenous farmers who grow land races nor the governments of their countries have been compensated for the use of these genetic resources. Critics have claimed that a double form of injustice occurs when these genetic resources are first taken without compensation, then sold back to developing countries in the form of seeds protected by patents or under plant breeders rights.
In addition to the above noted affects on farming communities, there have been several other concerns that have been associated with the dominance of hierarchical decision making styles and linked to the growing power of multinational companies.
Critics of food and agricultural biotechnology claim that policy making has been dominated by men who exhibit a decision making style that has been the target of the feminist social movement. They note the prevalence of a viewpoint that characterizes critical attitudes as emotional or irrational, and equates rational decision-making with an emphasis on economics and cost-benefit style comparison of decision options.
They also believe that decision-makers see nature as an object of human domination. Consistent with much of the literature in feminism, they see the domination of nature and the domination of women as themes with a common historical, intellectual and cultural origin.
Hence they argue that opposition to biotechnology and the overthrow of the existing decision-making elite for biotechnology follows from an ethical commitment to feminist philosophies of social justice. Vandana Shiva is particularly known for linking feminist ethics to the second and third conceptions of social justice noted above. A more general set of concerns have been raised in connection with industry's impact on publicly funded science. Biotechnology's Bitter Harvest Goldberg and coauthors, was one of the most influential publications to make a forceful ethical critique of food and biotechnology in a clear way.
Although the report included a critique of biotechnology on environmental grounds, it's primary argument was that U. This argument can be seen as a direct outgrowth of the issues concerning farming communities discussed above in Section 3. Yet in directing the brunt of its criticism at the planning and conduct of publicly funded agricultural research, the authors of this report made claims with a substantially different ethical importance.
Their argument connects with that of social critics who have been expressing concerns that commercial interests were having a growing influence on the conduct of science see Krimsky, ; Press and Washburn, The ethical issues associated with the planning and conduct of science should be seen as distinct from concerns about the impact of technical change on farming communities.
Someone who holds values that generally favor pursuit of food and agricultural biotechnology in the belief that it will help address world hunger, perhaps could still find fault with the way that the science agenda is being established in the era of biotechnology. The concern at the grossest level is that receipt of funding from industry might influence the results of research intended to review the safety of products. The concern that industry funding affects the public's confidence in research results, even if it does not unduly influence scientist's conduct, is closely related.
However, a more subtle set of ethical issues is probably more crucial to the future of food and agricultural biotechnology.
University scientists like to think of themselves as motivated by a quest for truth and understanding of natural processes. They often balk at the suggestion that questions of ethics or social utility should influence their choice of research topics see Grinnell, Nevertheless it is clear that scientists cannot conduct research without significant sources of funding beyond that of the salaries they receive for teaching.
One of the persistent criticisms of food and agricultural biotechnology has been that funds to examine the environmental consequences and ecological context of biotechnology have been relatively scarce, while funds that would serve the development of commercializable products have been plentiful. There is the further concern that, like so-called orphan drugs, agricultural technologies that have little profit potential receive little research support, despite their potential for social benefit.
Since government and foundation funding is explicitly committed to goals of public benefit, there is a legitimate ethical concern that funds may be diverted to leverage industry funding or toward patentable research that will provide universities with continued sources of financial support see Busch and coauthors, This section delves a bit more deeply into philosophical ethics to examine three responses that cut across the five impact areas discussed above.
The first discusses the Precautionary Principle, an idea that has been introduced to deal with questions of scientific uncertainty. The second section is a discussion of labels and consumer choice issues.
The third section is a brief discussion of the philosophical distinction between consequentialist and non-consequentialist approaches in applied ethics. In each of these areas, the author has ventured further in offering critical opinion and analysis than in preceding sections of the paper.
As noted above, there is always uncertainty about the consequences of technology. Here, the term 'uncertainty' is used to indicate the possibility of unknown and possibly unknowable consequences. This is different from the case in which it is possible to estimate the probability that a particular consequence will occur, or to measure how frequently a consequence will occur during a number of opportunities.
The latter approach is used to estimate morbidity and mortality associated with pesticide use, for example. These estimates are frequently treated as a "cost" of pesticide use, which may be judged ethically acceptable when offset by economic benefits.
This kind of cost-benefit offsetting is ethically controversial in its own right, but the issues raised by uncertainty are quite different. It may be useful to attack the problem of uncertainty by breaking it down. First, there is a form of statistically measurable uncertainty associated with estimates derived from scientific data.
This practice means that scientists are very conservative about allowing a result to viewed as 'known'. However, some have argued that in matters of human health it is ethically more important to be conservative in the opposite direction.
Second, no matter what the area of human endeavor, there is always the possibility that there is something that people have not thought of. With any novel activity, our relative lack of experience opens the possibility that there will be some novel way in which the practice can cause harm. Here, a conservative approach might weigh in against anything new.
Yet a third set of circumstances exist when there is scientific controversy about the possible consequences of a practice, or the likelihood of those consequences. In this case, it may be difficult to say exactly what precaution demands, depending on the nature of the dispute and the larger ethical problems that it concerns. All three of these circumstances can be said to involve uncertainty. The Precautionary Principle is less a single principle or decision rule than a general philosophy which dictates toward the most conservative response in each of the three cases.
The Precautionary Principle is also often used as a reason to reject practices that have consequences that would be impossible or difficult to reverse or mitigate. In debates over agricultural biotechnology, the Precautionary Principle is often placed in opposition to "risk based decision making.
There are, in fact, many ways in which both the Precautionary Principle and risk based decision making are described, so much so that the conflict over definitions threatens to overshadow the underlying philosophical issues. For example, critics of the Precautionary Principle portray it as a decision rule that allows perception of hazard to override documented evidence for hazard in regulation and enforcement of international agreements see Gray, Some authors describe the Precautionary Principle simply as a preference for statistical and evidential burdens of proof that favor public and environmental health interests over commercial and industrial interests in cases where there is little scientific consensus on the levels of risk associated with a practice see Cranor, ; Ozonoff, Others identify it with the integration of ethical concerns into regulatory decision making see O'Riordan and Jordan, ; Bernstein Following this line of thinking, others argue that a precautionary approach to uncertainty requires broader public participation in regulatory decision making Carr and Levidow, On this interpretation, the "precautionary approach" is a search for the appropriate response to the uncertainty and indeterminacy that pervades science-based characterizations of risk, rather than a well defined position or principle.
There are at least three distinct ethical concerns that are interwoven in debates over the precautionary approach. One is the claim that there is a need to anticipate harm to persons and the environment in advance, and to take action that will forestall this harm.
This is a theme that recurs frequently in statements of the Precautionary Principle, but it is not, in fact, a view that would be contested by advocates of the opposing "risk based" approach.
The risk based approach can be strongly committed to anticipatory action when the evidence warrants. A second concern notes that powerful commercial and industrial interests can influence the assumptions that are deployed in conducting scientific risk assessments. This, too, is a concern that has been voiced repeatedly by those who call not for an abandonment of risk assessment, but for a more objective implementation of risk based decision making see Graham, Green and Roberts, ; Mayo, ; Brunk, Haworth and Lee, It is thus likely that at least some of the alleged incompatibility between a "risk based" and a "precautionary" approach is terminological and rhetorical.
This is not to minimize the importance of these two ethical concerns; indeed, the fact that they have long been a part of the attempt to develop an adequate approach to technological risk assessment only underscores their importance. A third concern arises specifically in applying the precautionary approach to food and agricultural biotechnology. Some of the most convincing applications of the Precautionary Principle involve situations where it is fairly clear that human activity is affecting ecosystem process that would function reliably in the absence of impact from human beings.
Straightforward cases of chemical pollution of air and water fit this model, as do cases where marine ecology is affected by fishing or industrial activity. Here, the default option of "no human activity" genuinely seems to embody a precautionary approach. However, it is not clear how to extend this model to agriculture, where the default option to adoption of biotechnology is an array of farming practices in which humans are already having extensive impact on ecological processes.
The claim that biotechnology threatens to destabilize an ecologically sustainable food system in agriculture can be disputed. Industrial practices in agriculture already utilize chemical inputs, mechanized cultivation, harvesting and irrigation, fossil fuel consumption, and large-scale transport of nutrients and genetic resources. Though the point is contested, it is not at all clear that the existing industrial system is ecologically sustainable, that it ought to be preserved, or that agricultural biotechnology would lead to further destabilization of the system.
It thus appears that applying the Precautionary Principle to agriculture may also require a more complex discussion of the feasibility and desirability of alternative approaches to food production that reduce chemical, energy and mechanical inputs, but do not utilize biotechnology see Kirschenmann, We give our kids drugs like Ritalin to help them focus better, while adults undergo cosmetic surgery to look better.
These actions reject our imperfections and recognize that technology can make us better than how we were born. Over the past 30 years the quality of running shoes has improved greatly. Sneakers are no longer light leather tops with a durable waffle burned bottom. Today they are more ergonomic and cushioned for every kind of foot and build.
The same goes with swim suits and racing bicycles. But is it cheating when everyone does it? Is it cheating when every bicyclist has a custom made light as a feather bicycle in the tour de France?
If performance can be improved through better bikes or healthy diets, then why not through drugs? Some would say that drugs take away from the very elements in sports that draw us in. We are amazed by humans performing in almost subhuman ways. Many thought that running a mile in under 4 minutes would kill a man until Roger Banister stunned us by doing it in That is, until it was uncovered that he was using steroids. So when an athlete uses something to increase performance, we question: was it the person or the drug that made the achievement?
When the steroid user beats a record, who should be lauded with the award, the athlete or the pharmacist? In the same light, when the cyclist wins the Tour de France, who should wear the Yellow Jersey, the athlete or the bicycle designer? Genetic engineers are breaking though new barriers every day Will they be mentally or physically handicapped or prone to certain inherited diseases? And by learning that information scientists will, hand in hand, be able to alter that through genetic technology.
But what kind of message does this send and how far is too far? In some ways genetic intelligence sounds inviting, even responsible. Is it more ethical to raise the child or spare it possibly from a very difficult life? What if the parents found their child may be born like the 50 million in the world with an IQ under 90 or that he or she is missing their legs?
Would they alter that? If so, what does that say to the millions of people who live happy lives with IQs slightly below average or to wheelchair bound woman who wins the Boston Marathon?
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