Ethics Of Environmental Health

Environmental Health Ethics illuminates the conflicts between protecting the environment and promoting human health. In this study, David B. Resnik develops a method for making ethical decisions on environmental health issues. He applies this method to various issues, including pesticide use, antibiotic resistance, nutrition policy, vegetarianism, urban development, occupational safety, disaster preparedness, and global climate change. Resnik provides readers with the scientific and technical background necessary to understand these issues. He explains that environmental health controversies cannot simply be reduced to humanity versus environment and explores the ways in which human values and concerns - health, economic development, rights, and justice - interact with environmental protection.

Environmental health encompasses the assessment and control of those environmental factors that can potentially affect human health, such as radiation, toxic chemicals and other hazardous agents. It is often assumed that the assessment part is just a matter of scientific research, and the control part a matter of implementing standards which unambiguously follow from that research. But it is less commonly understood that environmental health also requires addressing questions of an ethical nature. How can we determine the "acceptable" risk level for the general population or for certain groups? How should we deal with uneven distributions of risks and benefits? How do we communicate about risks with the stakeholders? This multidisciplinary collection brings together a number of leading researchers and scholars in order to generate discussion surrounding these key questions, and to bring the ethical implications of science and technology to the forefront of critical thought. Providing a broad overview of the Ethics of Environmental Health, its philosophical foundations and practical applications, this book offers a significant contribution to ongoing discussions in sustainable development and will be of interest to scholars and practitioners of Environmental Health, urban studies and healthcare.

Research Ethics for Environmental Health explores the ethical basis of environmental health research and related aspects of risk assessment and control. Environmental health encompasses the assessment and control of those environmental factors that can potentially affect human health, such as radiation, toxic chemicals and other hazardous agents. It is often assumed that the assessment part is just a matter of scientific research, and that control is a matter of implementing standards that unambiguously follow from that research. But it is less commonly understood that environmental health also requires addressing questions of an ethical nature. Coming from multiple disciplines and nine different countries, the contributors to this book critically examine a diverse range of ethical concerns in modern environmental health research. This book will be of great interest to scholars and practitioners of environmental health, as well as researchers in applied ethics, environmental ethics, medical ethics, bioethics and those concerned with chemical and radiation protection.

Environmental health involves the assessment and control of environmental factors that can potentially affect human health, such as radiation, toxic chemicals and other hazardous agents. It is less commonly understood that environmental health also requires addressing questions of an ethical nature. Bringing together work from experts across a range of sub-disciplines of environmental health, this collection of essays discusses the ethical implications of environmental health research and its application, presented at the 3rd International Symposium on Ethics of Environmental Health held in August 2016 in the Czech Republic. In doing so, it builds upon the insights and ideas put forward in the first volume of Ethics of Environmental Health, published by Routledge in early 2017. This volume will be of great interest to students and scholars of environmental health, applied ethics, environmental ethics, medical ethics and bioethics, as well as those concerned with public health, environmental studies, toxicology and radiation.

There are thousands of substances manufactured in the United States to which the public is routinely exposed and for which toxicity data are limited or absent. Some insist that uncertainty about the severity of potential harm justifies implementing precautionary regulations, while others claim that uncertainty justifies the absence of regulations until sufficient evidence confirms a strong probability of severe harm. In this book, Levente Szentkirályi overcomes this impasse in his defense of precautionary environmental risk regulation by shifting the focus from how to manage uncertainty to what it is we owe each other morally. He argues that actions that create uncertain threats wrongfully gamble with the welfare of those who are exposed and neglect the reciprocity that our equal moral standing demands. If we take the moral equality and rights of others seriously, we have a duty to exercise due care to strive to prevent putting them in possible harm’s way. The Ethics of Precaution will be of great interest to researchers, educators, advanced students, and practitioners working in the fields of environmental political theory, ethics of risk, and environmental policy.

This text aims to bring bioethics and health care squarely into the 21st century. "The book shows how environmental decline relates to human health and to health care practices in the US and other industrialized countries."

Much of the previous literature in the field of safety focuses on either the technical equipment issues or the human performance factors that contribute to the active failures in safety-critical systems. However, this book provides guidance in the moral or ethical aspects of decision-making that perpetuate many of the latent failures in safety-critical systems. The book provides a concise introduction to the ethical foundations and follows up with case studies from aviation, healthcare, and environmental and occupational health.

Natural disasters and cholera outbreaks. Ebola, SARS, and concerns over pandemic flu. HIV and AIDS. E. coli outbreaks from contaminated produce and fast foods. Threats of bioterrorism. Contamination of compounded drugs. Vaccination refusals and outbreaks of preventable diseases. These are just some of the headlines from the last 30-plus years highlighting the essential roles and responsibilities of public health, all of which come with ethical issues and the responsibilities they create. Public health has achieved extraordinary successes. And yet these successes also bring with them ethical tension. Not all public health successes are equally distributed in the population; extraordinary health disparities between rich and poor still exist. The most successful public health programs sometimes rely on policies that, while improving public health conditions, also limit individual rights. Public health practitioners and policymakers face these and other questions of ethics routinely in their work, and they must navigate their sometimes competing responsibilities to the health of the public with other important societal values such as privacy, autonomy, and prevailing cultural norms. This Oxford Handbook provides a sweeping and comprehensive review of the current state of public health ethics, addressing these and numerous other questions. Taking account of the wide range of topics under the umbrella of public health and the ethical issues raised by them, this volume is organized into fifteen sections. It begins with two sections that discuss the conceptual foundations, ethical tensions, and ethical frameworks of and for public health and how public health does its work. The thirteen sections that follow examine the application of public health ethics considerations and approaches across a broad range of public health topics. While chapters are organized into topical sections, each chapter is designed to serve as a standalone contribution. The book includes 73 chapters covering many topics from varying perspectives, a recognition of the diversity of the issues that define public health ethics in the U.S. and globally. This Handbook is an authoritative and indispensable guide to the state of public health ethics today.