Lisa Heinzerling

Knowing Killing and Environmental Law

This paper argues that the ethical commitment against knowing killing should play a role in decisions about environmental problems. The ethical commitment against the knowing killing of one person by another - against murder - is reflected in laws that exist in all fifty U.S. states, in modern regulatory laws at the federal level, and in civil jury awards in tort cases involving profit-oriented corporations. This ethical commitment is also reflected in otherwise disparate approaches to moral philosophy. The ethical value discussed here is thus not a new norm, nor, in its traditional setting, a controversial one. Applying this norm in the context of environmental risks does create several complications, but they are not enough to de-activate the norm in this setting. This analysis reveals the morally problematic nature of using cost-benefit analysis to evaluate environmental decisions. Cost-benefit analysis involves precisely the kind of pre-killing weighing of the choice whether a person will live or die which our norm against knowing killing condemns.

Chapter 10 – Divide and Confound: The Relationship Between Transparency, Public Health, and Regulatory Authority in the National Food System

Abstract One of the great problems of the food system in the United States is its failure to understand and embody the unity of the health of the environment in which food is grown and the wholesomeness of the food itself. In law, no feature of the system better symbolizes this failure than the scattering of regulatory authority over the food supply across multiple federal agencies with multifarious missions. The fragmentation of authority induces inefficiency and ineffectiveness in pursuing a safe food supply. It also promotes opacity and dissonance in messages about the nature and quality of our food. Moving regulatory authority over food into one body rather than many would not, however, remove the most basic obstacles to a safe and transparent food supply, and it could, counterproductively, convince us that a bureaucratic reshuffling is all we need to achieve wholesome and open food.