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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Father Terrence who wrote (27693)	1/5/1999 8:11:00 PM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

FT, To reduce it to the barest terms: if I by a toilet and my neighbor doesn't, and if my neighbor proceeds to poop beside my well, do I then have the right to compel him to buy one? I would say that I do. The defect in the paradigm you present is the assumption that we are discussing the interest of all humankind. We are not. We are weighing the relative interests of many different people with many different preferences. My own economic choice - to buy a toilet or not to buy one - will have little effect on waste-disposal decisions made by the managers of a chemical plant down the street. Yet their decisions will have a very real effect on my health, and in some cases (witness Bhopal) my survival. Government must regulate the chemical plant in defense of my right to drink clean water and breathe clean air. In conclusion, the only environmental issues are those issues that reduce risk (John might complain about the Eboli virus being cloned in his basement) and those issues that generally make MAN more comfortable. Environmentalists might point out that if science lacks the capacity to assess accurately the risk stemming from any given action, it might be prudent to defer that action until accurate assessment is available. Cost/benefit analysis only functions when assessment of costs and benefits is reliable. Our ascendancy as a species is as much the consequence of our ability to regulate each other as it is of our ability to regulate nature. If one group is behaving in a way which endangers collective survival - and we are, after all, a part of the environment - the rest have the right and the responsibility to stop them. Steve