Safety, Risk and Environmental Protection

CHAPTER 13: SAFETY, RISK, AND ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION

OBJECTIVES

1. Identify the steps involved in the assessment of safety from an ethical point of view.
2. Identify the ethical issues and the relationships involved with product safety and corporate liability.
3. Distinguish the benefits and criticisms of a policy of strict liability.
4. Identify some of the moral issues involved with transferring dangerous industries to less developed countries.
5. Distinguish between pollution created by industry and pollution created by individual action, and evaluate the ethical distinctions that arise.

CHAPTER SUMMARY

CORPORATIONS, PRODUCTS, AND SERVICES

Since the primary function of a corporation, other than making money, is to produce a good or service, we can begin our ethical analysis with what is produced and how it is produced. A somewhat similar, although not identical, analysis applies to services.

We can certainly distinguish products, which in themselves are neither good nor bad, from harmful or unethical uses to which they might be put by some people. From a utilitarian perspective, one might wish to inquire which use is likely to be most prominent, whether the harm produced by making the product available outweighs the benefits, and whether the harm can be adequately controlled through legislation, public disapproval and pressure, or other similar means.

The goods produced should be safe and not cause preventable, foreseeable harm; they should be produced in conditions that do not harm those engaged in the productive process; and they should be produced in such a way as to minimize any harm done to the environment.

DO NO HARM

The injunction “Do no harm” is widely accepted as a prima facie second-order moral obligation binding on both individuals and corporations.

SAFETY AND ACCEPTABLE RISK

We can distinguish three different steps involved in the assessment of safety from an ethical point of view.

• The first is determining how much safety is attainable and how to attain it in a given endeavor. This is technical knowledge that producers should have or obtain.
• The second is deciding how much safety is demanded with respect to a particular product or activity. This is a question of acceptable risk.
• The third step, once that determination is made, is ascertaining whether a particular instance of a product or activity comes up to the specified standards.

In trying to decide how much risk to accept or how much safety to demand (the second of the above three steps) or for people to rationally decide about risk, four conditions must be satisfied.

• First, they must know that they are exposed to it.
• Second, people must know not only that they are at risk but also the nature and source of the risk to which they are exposed, if they are rationally to evaluate it.
• Third, in order to evaluate the risk the user must know both how great it is and how to deal with it—for instance, by avoiding it or minimizing it.
• Fourth, in order to rationally assess risk one must know what the alternatives are, if any.

PRODUCT SAFETY AND CORPORATE LIABILITY

If a manufacturer knows of a defect that increases risk to the purchaser and neither corrects the defect nor informs the purchaser, then the manufacturer is open to a charge of reckless negligence.

In the United States, the task of making that decision of “how safe is safe” has  fallen on the NHTSA, but since its establishment in 1966 it has not established many standards.