An Ethical Appraisal of Hormesis: Towards a Rational Discourse on the Acceptability of Risks and Benefits

Abstract

It is ethically mandated that potential beneficial aspects of low exposure to potentially hazardous material are incorporated in the risk-benefit balancing procedure. The potential harm done by pollutants does not justify the invocation of a categorical principle. Minimisation of risk is not required if health benefits are also at stake. Society needs to find an informed consent on the threshold of risk below compensation of goods is legitimate and morally justified. Such a threshold can be defined context-specific but any human action associated with potential health impacts makes such an acceptability judgment-implicitly or explicitly. Incorporating hormesis into risk management forces regulators to make such thresholds explicit. Once as risk is below this threshold all positive and negative impacts are subject to a relative balancing towards reaching a final judgment on acceptability and necessary risk management options. This balancing risk cannot be reduced to body counts: equity issues, context specific circumstances (voluntary or involuntary exposure, for example), avoidance of risks, the nature of vulnerable groups and many other factors need to be taken into account. Such a complex weighing exercise is best performed by an analytic-deliberative process by which the best available knowledge of impacts (including their uncertain ties) is fed into a deliberating body of individuals representing all sides of the debate. Organizing and structuring an analytic-deliberative discourse for assigning painful trade-offs goes beyond the good intention to have all relevant stakeholders involved in decision making.. Discursive processes need a structure that assures the integration of technical expertise, regulatory requirements, and public values. These different inputs should be combined in such a fashion that they contribute to the deliberation process the type of expertise and knowledge that can claim legitimacy within a rational decision making procedure.

Thinking about Values in Science: Ethical versus Political Approaches

“…But how can this be done given the wealth of competing values and preferences ? Should we simply accept the results of opinion polls as the basis for making political decisions ?”(2008, 27; emphasis added)Renn takes as his starting point the different values and preferences held by the public, and then searches for a way to adjudicate among them. This corresponds to what we saw earlier as a common characterization of the job of political philosophy: to determine how to establish common rules for a society marked by disagreement about values.…”

The Administrative Ordering of Nature and Society – Precaution and Food Safety at the Molecular and Global Levels

“…66 As Renn remarks: 'With respect to hormesis it is ethically mandated that potential beneficial aspects of low exposure to potentially hazardous material are incorporated in the risk-benefit balancing procedure'.' 67 From our perspective, it is important to constantly remind ourselves of the fact that access to sufficient food of adequate nutritional quality is far more important for human health than protection from trace amounts of potentially harmful chemicals. 68 This may be obvious for people in developing countries but it is also true for the poorer citizens in EU member states where malnutrition still is a common phenomenon.…”

A case for deliberation in response to hormesis research

“…This article suggests that policy-relevant areas of research should also be examined to determine whether they would benefit from broadly based deliberation. Drawing on this argument, the commentary's third goal is to provide a tentative diagnosis of the sorts of deliberation warranted by hormesis research, 8 a body of work that should be well known to readers of this journal.…”