Clark Wolf

Calls to regulate or restrict scientific research are often a matter of politics, and public desire to regulate science may have its source in several different underlying interests: on one side, people may be motivated by an interest to control risks, prevent harms, or limit access to powerful or dangerous technologies. These interests are easy to understand, and often provide entirely appropriate and creditable grounds for regulation. In a darker vein, people may be motivated by more general mistrust of science, or by moral or religious disapproval of some kinds of research. While these motives may be easy to understand, clearly they should be resisted. But if researchers hope to avoid inappropriate regulations, we need to be prepared to explain our research to the public. And when research is funded by tax dollars, it is especially important that scientists should be able to justify its benefit to taxpayers and legislators.

Regulatory agencies aim to protect the public by moderating risks associated with innovation, but a good regulatory regime should also promote justified public trust. After introducing the USDA 2020 SECURE Rule for regulation of biotech innovation as a case study, this essay develops a theory of justified public trust in regulation. On the theory advanced here, to be trustworthy, a regulatory regime must (1) fairly and effectively manage risk, must be (2) “science based” in the relevant sense, and must in addition be (3) truthful, (4) transparent, and (5) responsive to public input. Evaluated with these norms, the USDA SECURE Rule is shown to be deeply flawed, since it fails appropriately to manage risk, and similarly fails to satisfy other normative requirements for justified trust. The argument identifies ways in which the SECURE Rule itself might be improved, but more broadly provides a normative framework for the evaluation of trustworthy regulatory policy-making.

Concepts of sustainability guide policy and environmental management decisions. But when goals are articulated badly, they provide poor decision guides, and may lead to serious mistakes. This paper reviews and critically evaluates a series of popular conceptions of ‘sustainability,’ with special focus on a conception advocated by Bryan Norton. While no conception of sustainability is problem-free, we gain by understanding the limitations of each. Adaptive management, as I understand it here, is not a conception of sustainability, but a view about how conceptions of sustainability might be used in practical reasoning about policy or management.

RésuméJohn Rawls et Asha Bhandary utilisent les conditions de justice définies par David Hume pour encadrer le choix de la position originale à partir de laquelle les principes de justice sont sélectionnés. Utiliser les conditions de Hume de cette manière exclut de la représentation ceux qui ne sont pas des coopérateurs à part entière, y compris les personnes qui ont besoin de soins de dépendance pendant toute la vie. Cela implique que la demande de soins de ces personnes n'est pas une revendication fondamentale de justice, mais qu'elle doit avoir une priorité nettement inférieure. Cet article soutient qu'une théorie libérale appropriée de la prise en charge de la dépendance abandonnera ce cadrage humien et traitera la demande de prise en charge de la dépendance comme une exigence fondamentale de justice.