Bounty to Bust: The Ethics of Irreversible Environmental Degradation

- Richard S.J. Weisburd, Ph.D.
Institute of Biological Sciences,
University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba Science City 305, JAPAN
Email: weisburd@biol.tsukuba.ac.jp

Eubios Journal of Asian and International Bioethics 8 (1998), 52-54.


The case can be made that global changes, such as large-scale losses of biodiversity, climate change, and pollution with heavy metals and radionuclides, pose grave risks to the health of people now and in the future. For example, removing access to biodiversity, the biological milieu in which we evolved, might endanger not only the prosperity, but also the very existence of humans; enough keystone species might disappear to disrupt the ecosystem services upon which all humans depend. Some of the global changes now being driven by humans are likely to be either permanent, or irreversible on time-scales of thousands or even millions of years, far longer than human generations.

Irreversible environmental degradation has ethical dimensions not typically explored in considerations of right conduct among people. Among the factors characteristic of environmental degradation that may confound standard ethical analyses are ignorance of future harm, long lag times between cause and effect, harm to individuals not yet alive, harm to some groups but not others, and uncertainty about potential for harm. Here, I explore the ethics of irreversible environmental degradation with a series of hypothetical scenarios that progress from immediate and obvious unethical actions to those made more subtle and ambiguous by above-mentioned characteristics individually and in combination. The scenarios, by illustrating clear-cut situations are not particularly representative of the complexity and ambiguity in our modern reality, but by isolating the factors that complicate ethical consideration, they make these confounding elements more amenable to analysis. The analysis is prescriptive in nature, driving toward a presumption that irreversible environmental degradation is unethical.

Let us presume that there are universal ethical principles and that among them, murder is always unethical. Homicide, the killing of one person by another, is murder if it includes both premeditation and malice. Environmental degradation is killing people now and might kill many more in the future. Environmental degradation is a direct consequence of activities by people. Is environmental degradation the ethical equivalent of murder?

While in the past it may have been justifiable to claim that we did not know that environmental degradation would kill people, we now know, in many cases, that it does. Continuing to kill people via environmental degradation when this knowledge is available is premeditated and malicious homicide, in other words, murder. Let us explore this equivalence with a series of scenarios.

Scenario 1

A: You have discovered a home-scale industrial process with which you can make a profit of $100 million in one year. The only catch is that the process produces a toxic waste product. Although you can legally dump this waste product into your backyard, your neighbor gets her drinking water from a well beneath the border between your backyard and hers. She is unlikely to notice the resulting contamination, but you are quite certain that she and her family will die of poisoning 1 year later. You are also certain that your own health will be unaffected and that nobody will be able to identify your waste as the cause of your neighbors' deaths.

B: You have discovered a home-scale industrial process with which you can make a profit of $5 million annually. The only catch is that the process produces a toxic waste product. Although you can legally dump this waste product into your backyard, your neighbor gets her drinking water from a well beneath the border between your backyard and hers. She is unlikely to notice the resulting contamination, but she and her family will die of cancer 20 years later. You are certain that nobody will be able to identify your waste as the cause of your neighbors' deaths.

C: You have discovered a home-scale industrial process with which you can make a profit of $1 million annually. The only catch is that the process produces a toxic waste product. Although you can legally dump this waste product into your backyard, your pregnant neighbor gets her drinking water from a well beneath the border between your backyard and hers. She is unlikely to notice the resulting contamination, but the toxin is mutagenic and the genes of her fetus (in utero) will be damaged; all of this child's potential progeny would die of cancer when they reached the age of 35. You are certain that nobody will be able to identify your waste as the cause and anyway you will be long dead before any of your neighbor's potentially affected grandchildren reached that age.

Perhaps most people would find scenario 1A to be a clear ethical violation. Since you have advance knowledge of the deaths your actions will cause, it is clearly a premeditated crime. Regardless of any desire for harm to your neighbors, knowingly carrying out an act that causes severe harm even as an undesired byproduct constitutes legal malice. Homicide with both malice and premeditation is murder. Is scenario 1B less unethical than scenario 1A because the result of the action will not occur for 20 years? Perhaps not, although the time lag does confound the situation.

The ethical standing of scenario 1C is less clear; deaths may result from the release of toxin, but only if the fetus grows into an adult who then becomes a parent. If the fetus never produces its own children, then there might be no harm done. What standing is provided to future generations in today's legal structures and ethics? Do future generations have inherent ethical standing in consideration of what is right and what is wrong? Whereas we can be fairly confident that a generation will have children, an individual's descendants might or might not have children; do the potential progeny of an individual, as opposed to a future generation in general, have ethical and legal rights? Is scenario 1C, which might in retrospect turn out to harm nobody, less unethical than scenarios A or B?

Scenario 1 can be confounded in many other ways. What if the potential harm would not occur for 100 years, but would persist for 10 thousand years? Suppose that the probability that a given generation of one's heirs will produce children decreases with each generation projected out into the future; is it then ethically acceptable to cause some kinds of genetic damage that would have no impact on fitness because the probability of affected descendants being born falls below some threshold level?

In addition to the intergenerational aspects of the ethics of environmental degradation, there are also other ethical problems posed by uncertainty. In scenario 1, the potential for harm is presented as a certainty. However, most threats actually posed to human health and well-being by environmental degradation involve uncertainty. Does the introduction of uncertainty alter the ethics of scenario 1 A and B?

Scenario 2

A: You have discovered a home-scale industrial process with which you can make a profit of $100 million in one year. The only catch is that the process produces a toxic waste product. Although you can legally dump this waste product into your backyard, your neighbor gets her drinking water from a well beneath the border between your backyard and hers. She is unlikely to notice the resulting contamination, but she and her family will have a 90% chance of dying of poisoning within the subsequent year. You are certain that your own health will be unaffected, nobody will be able to identify your waste as the source of a health threat, and the risk will dissipate rapidly after the first year.

B: You have discovered a home-scale industrial process with which you can make a profit of $100 million in one year. The only catch is that the process produces a toxic waste product. Although you can legally dump this waste product into your backyard, your neighbor gets her drinking water from a well beneath the border between your backyard and hers. She is unlikely to notice the resulting contamination, but she and her family have a 1% chance of dying of poisoning within the subsequent year. You are certain that your own health will be unaffected, nobody will be able to identify your waste as the source of a health threat, and the risk will dissipate rapidly after the first year.

Your neighbor is more likely to be killed in scenario 2A than in 2B, and the former seems clearly unethical. Is it ethical for the entrepreneur to take the 1% risk of killing his neighbor in 2B? If not, then is there a level of probable harm below which it would be ethical to take the risk? Would it become ethical to impose this risk with permission from the neighbor by offering, in the event of death, to pay next-of-kin 50% of the profits? Acceptance of such a proposition might be affected by the financial well-being of the potential victim and her family.

Should we make distinctions based on the potential number of victims of environmental degradation. Let us explore this distinction by adding a massive scale element to the uncertainties of scenario 1; contrast scenario 3A (=1A) with the following variations:

Scenario 3

A: As in Scenario 1A.

B: You have discovered a home-scale industrial process with which you can make a profit of $100 million in one year. The process produces a waste product you can legally dump into your backyard, but the waste would then percolate into the aquifer used for drinking water for a large city. Although the waste product itself would cause no health effects, it would degrade into a powerful toxin. The toxin would likely cause health degradation and death in millions of residents of the city over one year until it decomposed naturally.

C: You have discovered a home-scale industrial process with which you can make a profit of $100 million in one year. The process produces a waste product you can legally dump into your backyard, but the waste would then percolate into the aquifer used for drinking water for a large city. Although the waste product itself would cause no health effects, it would degrade into a powerful mutagen and the genes of all children exposed in utero would be damaged. The mutagen would decompose within the subsequent year, but all potential progeny of the exposed fetuses would die of cancer when they reached the age of 35. You are certain that nobody will be able to identify your waste as the cause and anyway you will be long dead before any of the potentially affected grandchildren reached that age.

The potential harm imposed by Scenario 3-B is clearly far greater than that by 2-A. How do we compare the ethics of harming an individual versus those of harming many? Is unethicalness additive? How can we evaluate the ethics of actions taken now that have uncertain impacts in the future on many people, none of whom are alive now? Whereas there is reasonable doubt that harm would actually occur in scenario 1C, in scenario 3C eventual harm seems almost certain.

Let us consider one last scenario. All scenarios we have looked at to this point involved a single person imposing harm or risk of harm on others. What if more than one person is involved in imposing the risk of harm.

Scenario 4

A: As in Scenario 2-B

B: An entrepreneur in your country has discovered an industrial process with which your nation can expand its economy by $100 billion in one year. The process produces a waste product that can be legally emitted into the atmosphere, but the airborne waste would generally flow downwind to a large city in a neighboring country. Although research suggests that the waste product itself would cause no health effects, there is a 90% chance of that it would degrade in sunlight into a powerful toxin. If formed, the toxin would likely cause health degradation and death in millions of residents of the city. Your government has decided that in the difficult economic situation of the day and after a campaign to warn everyone of the dangers involved, the voters should have a chance to approve a referendum allowing development of this industrial process. The referendum passes with an overwhelming majority and in the subsequent year, a million residents of the neighboring country die of poisoning from the waste.

If 10 million voters supported the referendum, does each of those voters share one ten-millionth of the blame for the deaths of the million people in the neighboring country? If unethical behavior can be diluted to an acceptable level, then a billion people can together impose a collectively unethical burden on a future generation that would be unethical for an individual or a small number of individuals to impose.

Of course there are an infinite number of possible permutations of the types of scenarios I am describing. Yet some of the scenarios described above may be similar to processes that are actually underway. The profit motive, as employed in the scenarios presented above, is not inherently unethical. However, just as with any other motivation of human activities, it is also not sacrosanct and the consequences of actions do bear on the morality of those actions; to deny this is to accept ends justifying means. Many people today act in ways that benefit themselves, but endanger not only the health of people today, but also the well-being of future generations.

A final metaphor might illustrate this point graphically. Let us suppose that climate warming has a certain probability of melting the ice caps, switching off the global ocean circulation, and disrupting the global climate patterns and ecosystems to such an extent as to render the earth incapable of supporting human life. We might liken this to a game of Russian roulette. Today, by pumping massive amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, we are pulling the trigger on a revolver with one bullet and several empty chambers; the number of empty chambers corresponds to the actual probability of causing such a planetary ecological catastrophe. If the gun's hammer strikes the bullet, it will blow the heads off of all of our great-great-great-grandchildren many years in the future. Is it ethical to play this game if there is 1 empty chamber and 1 full chamber (i.e. a 50-50 chance of catastrophe)? Is it ethical to play if there are 1000 empty chambers? Is it ethical to play no matter how many empty chambers there are? The ethical answer is not clear, but the questions are troubling. Such questions warrant consideration on an urgent basis.

If we, as a species, are to survive, then we must find ways to regulate our affairs via universally acceptable ethics that reject creeping deterioration of the essential ecosystem services we all depend upon. These ethics must permit evaluation of behaviors that impose substantial possibilities of serious harm on many or all individuals in future generations. We must find ways to aggregate ethical violations across time, generations, numbers of victims, numbers of perpetrators, and uncertainty, perhaps in some quantitative fashion.

If human activities cause great harm to many people, by whatever means, then such activities are clearly not ethical. However, regardless of the ethics, I can think of no society in history that voluntarily reduced its own level of consumption to preserve resources for future generations. If we fail in meeting this challenge, then we may be condemning our descendents to life on a degraded world or perhaps even extinction. Will ethical conduct prevail? I welcome reader's comments.


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