Some Moral Issues in Risk Assessment

Major social institutions of a community, for example, the scientific, legal, religious institutions, in coping with the same problem or with aspects of a particularly complex problem may have practices that they follow or principles guiding their methods of inquiry that are inconsistent with one another. When this occurs, it is crucial to provide a consistent solution to the conflict, or there will be an intellectual and probably practical tension between the institutions. More seriously, if the inconsistency is not identified and resolved, principles of one institution may unknowingly influence or determine the deliberations and outcomes of another. It is the thesis of this article that the very demanding evidentiary standards adopted for scientific inquiry, where pursuit of truth for its own sake is the main goal, in many cases will unwittingly beg the outcome of debates about health care protections in our legal and regulatory institutions, where the evidentiary standards are much less demanding. It is not simply that the standards of good evidence are different, although that is true. Rather, in some very common circumstances in which scientific evidence is used as the basis of standard setting in regulatory law or as evidence of harm in a toxic tort suit, adherence to scientific standards of evidence, whether by scientists or by policymakers or judges, will force legal conclusions that would not be justified if they were based on the appropriate evidentiary standards in the law. The problem I allude to may well arise because scientists unwittingly adopt evidentiary standards for the use and reporting of statistical studies for regulatory or toxic tort