Book Notice: Shrader-Frechette on Environmental and Public Health

Having read three of her previous books, Risk and Rationality: Philosophical  Foundations for Populist Reforms (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991), Environmental Justice: Creating Equality, Reclaiming Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), and Ethics of Scientific Research (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994), I'm pleased to learn from Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (NDPR) of a fairly new title from Kristin Shrader-Frechette: Taking Action, Saving Lives: Our Duties to Protect Environmental  and Public Health (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). From the review by Madison Powers:

At the outset, it should be noted that environmental ethics is a comparatively small sub-set within practical ethics. Shrader-Frechette occupies a particularly small niche within that already small area of expertise.

One area of overlap between the concerns of a minority camp within bioethics and those of many who do environmental ethics is the question of whether humans have any moral duties to non-human animals. For the most part, however, environmental ethics focuses on a set of questions that occupies the attention of very few bioethicists. Does the natural world possess any intrinsic moral value independent of its instrumental value for sentient beings? Is biodiversity itself a morally significant matter?

Such questions often proceed to resolution under cover of an overarching question. Does our ethical focus on human welfare, especially human health, represent an unacceptably anthropocentric way of framing questions about the place of humans in nature? These specific questions are not Shrader-Frechette's questions, and the overarching issues they presuppose are not ones that animate her work. Instead, she works on a parallel track. Her concern lies with the relation between risks to human health and attempts to control, manipulate, and remake the natural environment.

In-depth scholarship within environmental ethics that has human health as a central concern is therefore relatively rare.

Public health ethics is perhaps the field having the closest intellectual kinship with Shrader-Frechette's work, but there too there is a considerable difference in emphasis. The bulk of the public health ethics literature concentrates either on the ethics of interference with individual liberty through various public health interventions, or on the distributive justice issues that arise out of public policy priority setting with respect to the promotion and protection of population health. Contributions to human health deficits by way of environmental risk factors are more widely discussed than acted upon within public health practitioner circles, but within the literature of public health ethics, these issues generate little more than footnotes.

There are, nonetheless, very significant overlaps between public health ethics and environmental ethics as Shrader-Frechette approaches the subject. Her sub-title, Our Duties to Protect Environmental and Public Health, reflects her synthetic ambitions for bridging this gap. Public health ethics, like the central practice paradigm of public health itself, is traditionally concerned with disease prevention and control, and of course, more recently with behavioral risk factors that can be addressed through health education or marketplace regulation. But with more than 80,000 chemical compounds in the workplace, the home, and the broader environment, remarkably little in any great detail has been written on these arguably more substantial risk factors, or on the enormous range of ethical issues that are raised by our largely unreflective but ubiquitous alterations of the natural world.

Readers not familiar with the literatures of the various sub-disciplines of practical ethics may marvel that such a gap would exist. How, they might ask, could scholars in this area have failed to map the obvious connections?

There are, of course, many factors that account for what academics choose to study and what they overlook, but the sheer range of expertise and mix of disciplinary competences necessary to map the terrain goes a long way toward explaining why Shrader-Frechette has a unique voice in the field, and why this, and other books by her, are of such great (and I think, overlooked) intellectual importance.

This book offers an accessible primer for anyone who wants to know the kinds of things one needs to know in order to reflect on questions of environmental ethics from a perspective that elevates human health risks to the foreground.

It's interesting to consider this book in light of Onora O'Neill's suggestion that the "two principal domains of bioethics are medical ethics (broadly interpreted to include the ethics of bio-medical research) and environmental ethics."

Professor Shrader-Frechette taught in the Philosophy Dept. (and the Dept. of Environmental Studies) of my alma mater, UC Santa Barbara, back in the 1980s and I've always wondered how or why they let her get away.

Patrick S. O'Donnell

Comments

[Daniel S. Goldberg]

Also relevant here is the fact that the original coinage of the term "bioethics," generally attributed to Van Rensselaer Potter, was much closer to environmental ethics than the term has currently evolved to refer.

[Navtej Kohli]

I haven't read this book but by what you described in your post it seems worth a read. I have always been interested in bioethics and I feel that this will be a good knwoledge base for me.

[Patrick S. O'Donnell]

Under "Medical Humanities Bibliographies" at left there is a bibliography for bioethics as well should you be interested in other books on the subject.