In chapter 3, Shrader-Frechette explains why health sciences are so easily manipulated; what private interest science accomplishes through front groups, think tanks, and what she calls “hire education;” and who is responsible for funding and performing private interest science. She concludes that flawed ethics in private interest science ignore rights to life, disclosure and consent.
The anecdote at the beginning of chapter 3 was very difficult for me to accept. It’s pretty abhorrent to me (although, again, not surprising) that our government conspired through hiring radiation consultants and private interest doctors to avoid paying claims “to nearly half a million ‘atomic veterans.’” It seems to me that veterans–men and women who sacrificed their health and livelihood for this country–ought to constitute the ethical bare minimum of government debt to public health, especially considering the fact that industry in the United States thrives on its military status. I was really interested in Shrader-Frechette’s evaluation of white-collar crimes as crimes which occur under the radar of public scrutiny, although they affect the public via pollution-related heath effects. It’s amazing to me that I could turn on the news and hear a dozen blue-collar crime stories about black men stealing or murdering, but rarely hear the headline, “This just in: the government’s trying to poison us again.” Especially since cases like Enron and Worldcom are socially destructive and ethically degenerative to our nation’s image on much more massive scales. And yet private interests keep these white collar crimes under wraps through agenda-driven front groups and privately funded think tanks, preventing the public from fulfilling our ethical rights to knowledge and consent. Shrader-Frechette rightly identifies the solution to lack of transparency in the United States as full disclosure of “media sources’ major funding sources.” She also addresses the need for citizen education, deliberative democracy, and active reforms.
Chapter 4 was very helpful in terms of tying together the themes of this class into a conclusive solution to issues of environmental injustice. Shrader-Frechette writes that citizens who participate in or benefit from social institutions that have caused environmental injustice “have prima facie dutues either to stop their participation in these institutions or to compensate for it by helping to reform them.” Shrader-Frechette identifies both ethical and democratic responsibilities of citizens to respond to environmental injustice. Specifically, we ought to help prevent and alleviate threats to human rights, which she defines as “protection of life and health… minimal standards for treatment of humans that governments, societies, and individuals ought to respect.” According to the author, “institutional orders that display radical inequality in the fulfillment of human rights are prima facie unjust,” and citizens that “regulate” this unjust order (eg, by electing officials) are partly responsible for its activity.
This is an issue close to my heart as I consider employment opportunities in the voluntary sector following graduation from Drake. Citizen responsibility is the primary ethical reason driving me to join the Peace Corps. The United States is at least moderately responsible for economic depression and sociopolitical upheaval in the global South, for environmental justice issues discussed previously in class (eg, pesticide exports, “free trade” agreements, e-waste exports, etc), and it’s my belief that U.S. citizens ought to compensate for the harmful effects of our nation on others to the best of our ability. For me, as a trained ecologist, that may mean teaching middle schoolers about the long-term economic benefits of wetland conservation in areas where oil-drilling is the only short-term solution to economic depression, or working with local NGOs in Latin America to create income-generating activities in central areas in order to prevent environmentally harmful activities like logging or poaching. These are simple things within my means that would help compensate for the U.S.’ contribution to developing dire situations in other nations.
