Box 97, Item 4: Draft of Nuclear power - some ethical and social dimensions

Box 97, Item 4: Draft of Nuclear power - some ethical and social dimensions

Typescript (photocopy) of draft, with handwritten emendations and corrections with whiteout, undated. Paper published, Routley R and Routley V (1982) 'Nuclear power—some ethical and social dimensions', in Regan T and VanDeVeer D (eds) And justice for all: new introductory essays in ethics and public policy, Rowman and Littlefield.

Unnumbered paper from collection, item number assigned by library staff.

The University of Queensland's Richard Sylvan Papers UQFL291, Box 97, Item 4

1982-01-01

This item was identified for digitisation at the request of The University of Queensland's 2020 Fryer Library Fellow, Dr. N.A.J. Taylor.

For all enquiries about this work, please contact the Fryer Library, The University of Queensland Library.

[36] leaves. 27.13 MB.

Manuscript

' i '

Vai Routley

Richa/

1.
NUCLEAR POWER - SOME ETHICAL AND SOCIAL DIMENSIONS1

One hardly needs initiation into the dark mysteries of
nuclear physics to contribute usefully to the debate now
widely ragging over nuclear power. While many important
empirical questions are still unresolved, these do not
really lie at the centre of the controversy. Instead,
it is a debate about values...
many of the questions which arise are social and ethical
ones.

I. THE TRAIN PARABLE AND THE NUCLEAR WASTE PROBLEM.
train has just pulled out.

passengers and freight.

The train which is

A long distance country

crowded carries both

At an early stop in the journey someone consigns as

freight, to a far distant destination, a package which contains a highly
toxic and explosive gas.

This is packed in a very thin container which, as

the consigner is aware, may well not contain the gas for the full distance

for which it is consigned, and certainly will not do so if the train should
strike any real trouble, for example, if the train should be derailed or
involved in a collision,

or if some passenger should interfere inadvertently

or deliberately with the freight, perhaps trying to steal some of it.
of these sorts of things have happened on some previous journeys.

All

If the

container should break the resulting disaster would probably kill at least

some of the people on the train in adjacent carriages, while others could

be maimed or poisoned or sooner or later incur serious diseases.
Most of us would roundly condemn such an action.

of the parcel say to try to justify it?

What might the consigner

He might say that it is not certain

that the gas will escape, or that the world needs his product and it is his

duty to supply it, or that in any case he is not

or the people on it.
X

responsible for the train

These sorts of excuses however would normally be seen

/as ludicrous when set in this context.

Unfortunately, similar excuses are

not -aiso seen when the consigner, again a (responsible) businessman,puts his
workers’ health or

other peoples’ welfare at risk.

Suppose he says that it is his own and others’p ressing needs which justify
his action.

The company he controls, which produces the material as a by-product,

is in bad financial straits, and could not afford to produce a better container

even if it knew how to make one.

If the company fails, he and his family

will suffer, his employees will lose their jobs and have to look for others,

and the whole company town, through loss of spending, will be worse off.

The

poor and unemployed of the town, whom he would otherwise have been able to help,

will suffer especially.

Few people would accept such grounds as justification.

Even where there are serious risks and costs to oneself or some group for whom

one is concerned one is usually considered not to be entitled to simply
transfer the heavy burden of those risks and costs onto other uninvolved parties,

especially wheie they arise from one’s own, or one’s group’s chosen life-style.
The matter of nuclear waste has many moral features which resemble the

train case.

How fitting the analogy is will become apparent as the argument

progresses.

There is no known proven safe way to package the highly toxic

wastes generated by the nuclear plants that will be spread around the world as

large-scale nuclear development goes ahead.

The waste problem will be much

more serious than that generated by the 50 or so reactors in use at present,

with each one of the 2000 or so reactors envisaged by the end of the century
producing, on average, annual wastes containing 1000 times the radioactivity
of the Hiroshima bomb.

Much of this waste is extremely toxic.

For example,

a millionth of a gramme of plutonium is enough to induce a lung cancer.

A leak

of even a part of the waste material could involve much loss of life, widespread
disease and genetic damage, and contamination of immense areas of land.

Wastes

will include the reactors themselves, which will have to be abandoned after their

expected life times of perhaps 40 years, and which, some have estimated, may
require 1% million years to reach safe levels of radioactivity.
Nuclear wastes must be kept suitably isolated from the environment for

their entire active lifetime.

For fission products the required storage period

averages a thousand years or so, and for transuranic elements, which include

plutonium, there is a half million to a million year storage problem.

Serious

problems have arisen with both short-term and proposed long-term methods of

storage, even with the comparatively small quantities of waste produced over
I
the last twenty years.
Short-term methods of storage require continued human
intervention, while proposed longer term methods are subject to both human inter­
ference and risk of leakage through non-human factors.

No one with even a slight knowledge of the geological and climatic history
of the earth over the last million years, a period whose fluctuations in climate
we are only just beginning to guage and which has seen four Ice Ages, could be

confident that a rigorous guarantee of safe storage could be provided for

the vast period of time involved.

Nor does the history of human affairs over the

last 3000 years give ground for confidence in safe storage by methods requiring

human intervention over perhaps a million years.

Proposed long-term storage methods

such as storage in granite formations or in salt mines, are largely speculative
and relatively untested, and have already proved to involve difficulties with

attempts made to put them into practice.

Even as regards expensive recent

proposals for first embedding concentrated wastes in glass and encapsulating the

result in multilayered metal containers before rock deposit, simulation models

3.

reveal that radioactive material may not remain suitably isolated from human
10
environments.
In short, the best present storage proposals carry very real
possibilities of irradiating future people and damaging their environmentP

Given the

heavy costs which could be involved for the future, and given

the known limits of technology, it is methodologically unsound to bet, as

nuclear nations have, on the discovery of safe procedures for storage of wastes.
Any new procedures (required before 2000) will probably be but variations on
not only have
present proposals, and subject to the same inadequacies.
For instance,y none

of the proposed methods for safe storage has been properly tested,

but they

may well prove to involve unforeseen difficulties and risks when an attempt is

made to put them into practice on a commercial scale.

Only a method that

could provide a rigorous guarantee of safety over the storage period, that

placed safety beyond reasonable doubt, would be acceptable.

It is difficult

to see how such rigorous guarantees could be given concerning either the
geological or future human factors.

But even if an economically viable,

rigorously safe long term storage method could be devised, there is the problem

of guaranteeing that it would be universally and invariably used.

The

assumption that it would be (especially if, as appears likely, such a method
proved expensive economically and politically) seems to presuppose a level of

efficiency, perfection, and concern for the future which has not previously
been encountered in human affairs, and has certainly not been conspicuous in

the nuclear industry.

The risks imposed on the future by proceeding with nuclear development are,
then, significant.

to bear

Perhaps 40,000 generations of future people could be forced

significant risks resulting from the provision of the (extravagant)

energy use of only a small proportion of the people of 10 generations.
Nor is the risk of direct harm from the escape or misuse of radioactive

materials the only burden the nuclear solution imposes on the future.

Because

the energy provided by nuclear fission is merely a stop gap, it seems probable
that in due course the same problem, that of making a transition to renewable
sources of energy, will have to be faced again by a future population which will

probably, again as a result of our actions, be very much worse placed to cope

with it.

Their world will most likely be a world which is seriously depleted

of non-renewable resources, and in which such renewable resources as forests
and soils as remain, resources which inevitably form an important part of the
basis of life, are run-down or destroyed.

Such points tell against the idea

that future people must be, if not direct beneficiaries of energy from nuclear

fission, at least indirect beneficiaries.

The "solution” then is to buy time for contemporary society at a price

which not only creates serious problems for future people but which reduces
their ability to cope with these problems.

Like the consigner in the train

parable, contemporary industrial society proposes, in order to get itself out
of a

mess arising from its own life-style - the creation of economies

dependent on an abundance of non-rerewable energy, which is limited in supply -

to pass on costs and risks of serious harm to others who will obtain no

corresponding benefits.

The "solution" may enable the avoidance of some

uncomfortable changes in the lifetime

of those now living and their immediate

descendants, just as the consigner’s action avoids uncomfortable changes for

him and those in his immediate surroundings, but at the expense of passing

heavy burdens to other uninvolved parties whose opportunity to lead decent
lives may be seriously jeopardised.

If we apply to the nuclear situation the standards of behaviour and moral
principles generally acknowledged (in principle, if not so often in fact) in

the contemporary world, it is not easy to avoid the conclusion that nuclear

development involves injustice with respect to the future on a grand scale.

There appear to be only two plausible ways of trying to avoid such a conclusion.
First, it might be argued that the moral principles and obligations which we

acknowledge for the contemporary world and perhaps the immediate future do not

apply to those

in the non-immediate future.

Secondly, an attempt might be

made to appeal to overriding circumstances; for to reject the consigner’s

action in the circumstances Outlined is not to imply that there are no
circumstances in which such an action might be justifiable.

As in the case

of the consigner of the package there is a need to consider what these

justifying circumstances might be, and whether they apply in the present case.
We consider these possible escape routes for the proponent of nuclear
development in turn.

II. OBLIGATIONS TO THE (DISTANT) FUTURE.

The especially problematic area

is that of the distant (i.e. non-immediate) future, the future with which
people alive today will have no direct contact; by comparison, the immediate

future gives fewer problems for most ethical theories.

In fact the question

of obligations to future people presents tests which a number of ethical theories

fail to pass, and also has serious repercussions in political philosophy as

regards the adequacy of accepted (democratic and other) institutions which do

not take due account of the interests of future creatures.

5.

Moral philosophers have, predictably, differed on questions of obligations
to distant future creatures.

A good many of the philosophers who have explicitly

considered the question have come down in favour of the same consideration
being given to the rights and interests of future people as to those of
contemporary or immediately future people.

Others fall into three categories:

those who acknowledge obligations to the future but who do not take them
seriously or who assign them a lesser weight, those who deny, or who are

committed by their general moral position to denying, that there are moral
obligations beyond the immediate future, and those who come down, with

admirable philosophical caution, on both sides of the issue, but with the

weight of the argument favouring the view underlying prevailing economic
and political institutions, that there are no moral obligations to the future
beyond those perhaps to the next generation.

According to the most extreme of these positions against moral obligations to
the future, our behaviour with respect to the future is morally unconstrained;
there are no moral restrictions on acting or failing to act deriving

effect of our actions on future people.

from the

Of those philosophers who say, or whose

views imply that we do not have obligations to the (non-immediate) future, many

have based this view on accounts of moral obligation which are built on
relations which presuppose some degree of temporal or spatial contiguity.

Thus,

moral obligation is seen as presupposing various relations which could not hold

between people widely separated in time (or sometimes in space).

Let us call

the position that we have no obligations to (distant) future people the

constraints position.
'

-*■

■■■--------- -----

No­

,

Among suggested bases or grounds of moral obligation for the position,
which would rule out obligations to the non-immediate future, are these.

Firstly, there are those accounts which require that someone to whom a moral
obligation is held be able to claim his rights or entitlement.

People in the

distant future will not be able to claim rights and entitlements against us,

and of course they can do nothing to enforce any claims they might have
against us.

Secondly, there are those

accounts which base moral obligations

on social or legal convention, for example a convention which would require
punishment of offenders or at least some kind of social enforcement.

But

plainly these and other conventions will not be invariant over change in society
and amendment of legal conventions; hence they will not be invariant over time.

Also future people have no way of enforcing their interests or punishing
offending predecessors.

The No-constraints view is a very difficult one to sustain.

Consider, for

example, a scientific group which, for no particular reason other than to test a

particular piece of

technology, places in orbit a cobalt bomb set off by a

triggering device designed to go off several hundred years from the time of its

despatch.

No presently living person and none of their immediate descendants

would be affected, but the population of the earth in the distant future would

be wiped out as a direct and predictable result of the action.

The no—constraints

position clearly implies that this is an acceptable moral enterprise, that

whatever else we might legitimately criticize in the scientists’ experiment
(perhaps its being over-expensive or badly designed) we cannot lodge a moral

protest about the damage it will do to future people.

The no-constraints

position also endorses as morally acceptable the following sorts of policy

A firm discovers it can make a handsome profit from mining, processing and
manufacturing a new type of material which, although it causes no problem for
present people or their immediate descendants, will over a period of hundreds

of years decay into a substance which will cause an enormous epidemic of cancer

among the inhabitants of the earth at that time.

According to the no-constraints

view the firm is free to act in its own interests, without any consideration
for the harm it does remote future people.
Such counterexamples to the No-constraints position, which are easily
varied and multiplied, might seem childlishly obvious.

Yet this view is far

from being a straw man; not only have several philosophers endorsed this

position, but it is a clear implication of many currently popular views of the

basis of moral obligation, as well as of prevailing economic theory.

It seems

that those who opt for the No-constraints position have not considered such

examples, despite their being clearly implied by their position.

We suspect

that (we certainly hope that) when it is brought out that their position admits

such counterexamples, that without any constraints we are free to cause

pointless harm for example, most of those who opted for this position would
want to assert that it was not what they intended.

What many of those who have

put forward the No-constraints position seem to have had in mind (in denying

moral obligation) is rather that future people can look after themselves, that

we are not responsible for their lives.

The popular view that the future can

take care of itself also seems to assume a future causally independent of the

present.

But it is not.

It is not as if, in the counterexample cases or in

the nuclear case, the future is simply being left alone to take care of itself.
Present people are influencing it, and in doing so thereby acquire many of
the same sorts of moral responsibilities as they do in causally affecting the

present and immediate future, most notably the obligation to take account in

7.

what they do of people affected and their Interests,

to be careful in their

actions, to take account of the genuine probability of their actions causing
harm, and to see that they do not act so as to rob future people of the chance
of a good life.

Furthermore, to say that we are not resposible for the lives of future

people does not amount to the same thing as saying that we are free to do as we
like with respect to them.

In just the same way, the fact that one does not

have or has not acquired an obligation to some stranger with whom one has never
been involved does not imply that one is free to do what one likes with respect
to him, for example to rob him or to seriously harm him when this could be

avoided.
These difficulties for the No-constraints position result in part

because of a failure to make an important distinction.

Some of our

obligations to others arise because we have voluntarily entered into some

agreement with them - for example, we have made a promise.

Other obligations,

however, such as our duty not to damage or harm someone, do not assume that

an agreement has been struck between us.
former kind acquired obligations

Let us call obligations of the

and those of the latter unacquired obligations.

There is a considerable difference in the type of responsibility associated with
each.

In the case of acquired obligations responsibility arises because one

should do something which one can fail to do, e.g. keep a promise.

In the

case of unacquired duties responsibility arises as a result of being a causal
agent who is aware of the consequences or probable consequences of his action,

a responsibility that is not dependent on one’s having performed some act in

the past (e.g., made a promise).

Our obligations to future people clearly

are of unacquired, not acquired obligations, a fact the No-constraints position
simply fails to take into account.

These obligations arise as a result of our

ability to produce causal effects of a reasonably predictable nature, whether

on our contemporaries or

on those in the distant future.

Thus, to return to

the train parable, the consigner cannot argue in justification of his action
that he has, for example, never assumed or acquired responsibility for the
passengers, that he does not know them and therefore has no love or sympathy for
them and that they are not part of his moral community; in short, that he has

acquired no obligation, and has no special obligations to help them.

All that

8.

one needs to argue concerning the train, and in the nuclear case, is that there

are moral obligations against imposing harm for instance which are not specially
ions, to the distant
acquired. Nor can this claim be rebutted by the pretence'
.at/future involve

heroic self sacrifice, something ’’above and beyond" what is normally required.

One is no more engaging in heroic self sacrifice by not forcing future people
into an unviable life position or by refraining from causing them direct harm
than the consigner is resorting to heroic self sacrifice in refraining from

shipping the dangerous package on the train.

III.

ATTEMPTS TO REDUCE OBLIGATIONS TO THE FUTURE.

In evading these

difficulties the No-constraints position may be qualified rather than wholly

abandoned.

According to the Qualified position

we are not entirely unconstrained

There are obligations, even to distant future

with respect to the distant future.

people, but these are not so important as those to the present, and the interests

of distant future people cannot weigh very much in the scale against those of

the present and immediate future.

The interests of future people then, except

in unusual cases, count for very much less than the interests of present
people.

Hence such things as nuclear development and various exploitative

activities which benefit present people should proceed, even if people of the
distant future are (somewhat) disadvantaged by them.
The Qualified position appears to be widely held and is implicit in

prevailing economic theories, where the position of a decrease in weight of
future costs and benefits (and so of future interests) is obtained by
application over time of a discount rate, so discounting costs and risks to

future people.

The attempt to apply economics as a moral theory, something

that is becoming increasingly common, can lead theft to the Qualified position.

What is objectionable in such an approach is that economics must operate within
the bounds of acknowledged non-acquired moral constraints, just as in practice

it operates within legal constraints.

What economics cannot legitimately do is

determine what these constraints are.

There are, moreover, alternative economic

theories and simply to adopt, without further ado, one which discounts the future,
giving much less importance to the interests of future people, is to beg all

the questions at issue.

Among the arguments that economists offer for generally discounting

the future, the most threadbare is based on the Rosy-future assumption, that

future generations will be better off than present ones (and so better placed
to handle the waste problem).

generations may well not

Since there is mounting evidence that future

be better off then present ones, especially in things

that matter, no argument for discounting the interests of future generations
on this basis can carry much weight.

For the waste problem to be handed down

9.

to the future generations, it would have to be shown, what recent economic

progress hardly justifies, that future generations will be not just better off
but so much better off that they can

(easily) carry and control the nuclear

freight.

A more plausible argument for discounting, the Opportunity-cost argument,

builds directly

It is argued from the fact

on the notion of opportunity cost.

that a dollar gained now is worth much more than a dollar received in the non-

immediate future (because the first dollar could meanwhile be invested at
compound interest), that discounting is required to obtain equivalent monetary
values.

This same line of reasoning is then applied to the allocation of

resources.

Thus, compensation - which is what the waste problem is taken to come

to economically - costs much less now than later, e.g. a few pennies set aside
(e.g. in a trust fund) in the future, if need be, will suffice to compensate
eventually for any victims of remote radioactive waste leakage.

beset this approach.

Two problems

First, there are, presently at least, insurmountable

practical difficulties about applying such discounting.
how to determine appropriate future discount rates.
that the argument depends on a false assumption.

We simply

do not know

A more serious objection is

It is not true that value, or

damages, can always be converted into monetary equivalents.

There is no clear

’’monetary compensation” for a variety of damages, including cancer, loss of
life, a lost species.

The discounting theme, however argued for, is inadequate, because it
leads back in practice to the No-constraints position.
discounting imposes an ” economic horizon”

The reason is that

beyond which nothing need be

considered, since any costs or benefit which might arise are,

when discounted

back to the present, negligible.
»

A different argument for the Qualified position, the

Probabilities argument,

avoids the objections from cases of certain damage through appeal to probability

considerations.

The distant future, it is argued, is much more uncertain than the

present and immediate future, so that probabilities are consequently lower,
perhaps even approaching or coinciding with zero for any hypothesis concerning

the distant future.

Thus, the argument continues, the interests of future

people must (apart from exceptional cases where there is an unusually high degree
of certainty) count for (very much) less than those of present and neighbouring
people where (much) higher probabilities are attached.

So in the case of

conflict between the present and the future, where it is a question of weighing
certain benefits to the people of the present and the immediate future against

a much lower probability of indeterminate costs to an indeterminate number of

10.

distant future people, the issue would normally be decided in favour of the present,

assuming anything like similar costs and benefits were involved.
is however

The argument

Firstly, probabilities involving distant

badly flawed.

future situations are not always less than those concerning the immediate
future in the way the argument supposes.
problems often

Moreover the outcomes of some moral

do not depend on a high level of probability.

In many cases it

is enough, as the train parable reveals, that a significant risk is created;
such cases do not depend critically on high probability assignments.

Nor,

of course, can it be assumed that anything like similarly weighted costs and

benefits are involved in the nuclear case, especially if it is a question of
risking poisoning some of the earth for half a million or so years, with

consequent risk of serious harm to thousands of generations of future people,
in order to obtain quite doubtful, or even trivial, benefits for some present people,
^in the shape of the opportunity to continue (unnecessarily) high energy use.
And even

the costs and benefits were comparable or evenly weighted, such

if

an argument would be defective, since an analogous argument would show that

the consigner's action in the train parable, is acceptable provided the benefit
(e.g. the profit the company stood to gain from imposing significant risks on

other people) was sufficiently large.
Such a cost-benefit approach to moral and decision, problems, with or

is quite inadequate when different parties

without the probability frills,

are involved or when cases of conflict of interest involving moral obligations
are at issue.
permissible

5

For example, such a cost-benefit approach would imply that it is

for a company to injure, or very likely injure, some innocent party

provided only that the company stands to make a sufficiently large gain from it,

that costs to some

group

are more than morally

larger benefits to another group.
transferred in any

compensated for by

But costs or benefits are not legitimately

simple way from one group to another.

The often

appealed to maxim "If you (or your group) want the benefits you have to accept

the costs" is one thing, but the maxim "If I (or my group) want the benefits

then you have to accept the costs (or some of them at least)"

is another and

i
very different thing.

I

11.

It is a widely accepted moral principle that one is

not, in general, entitled to simply transfer costs of a significant kind arising
from an activity which benefits oneself onto other parties who are not involved
g
in the activity and are not beneficiaries.
This Transfer-limiting principle

is especially clear in cases

of which a thalidomide manufacturing and

marketing company is one, where the significant costs include an effect

on life or health or a risk thereof, and where the benefit to the benefitting

party is of a noncrucial or dispensible nature.

The principle is of

fundamental importance in the nuclear debate, and appears again and again :

it applies not merely to the waste problem but as regards several other
liabilities of nuclear development, e.g. the risk of nuclear war, the matter

of reactor meltdown.

In particular, the principle, invalidates the comparison,

heavily relied on in building a case for the acceptability of the nuclear risks,

between nuclear risks and those from such activities as airplane travel or

cigarette smoking.

In the latter case those who supposedly benefit from the

activity are also, to an overwhelming extent, those who bear the serious health
costs and risks involved.

In contrast the users and supposed beneficiearies

of nuclear energy will be risking not only, or even primarily, their own
lives and health, but also that of others who may not be beneficiaries at all—
who may be just the opposite!

,

More generally, the distribution of costs and damage in such a fashion,
i.e. on to non-beneficiaries, is a characteristic of certain serious forms of
pollution, and is among its morally objectionable features.

production, from nuclear or fossil
pollution.

fuel sources, can cause or lead to serious

Thus from the Transfer-limiting

important necessary condition for energy options:
an energy option

Large-scale energy

principle emerges an
To be morally acceptable

should not involve the transfer of significant costs or

risks of harm onto parties who are not involved, who do not use or do not

benefit correspondingly from the energy source.

Included in the scope of

12.

this condition, which nuclear development violates , are future people, i.e.
not merely people living at the present time but also future generations (those

of the next towns).

A

further corollary of the principle is the Transmission

Principle, that we should not hand the world we have so exploited on to our

successors in substantially worse shape than we "received” it.

For if we did

then that would be a significant transfer of costs.
The Transfer-limiting principle can be derived from certain ethical

theories (e.g. those of a

deontic cast such as Kant’s and Rawls’) and

from common precepts (such as the Golden Rule), where one seriously considers

putting oneself in another’s position.

But the principle is perhaps best

defended, on a broader basis, inductively, by way of examples.
embroider the train parable, the

company

town decides to

Suppose, to

solve

its

disposal problem by shipping its noxious waste to another town down the line,
which (like future towns) lacks the means to ship it back or to register due

protest.

The inhabitants of this town are then forced to face the problem

either of undertaking the expensive and difficult disposal process or of sus­

taining risks to their own lives and health.

Most of us would regard this kind

of transfer of costs as morally unacceptable, however much the consigner’s company
town flourishes.

IV. UNCERTAINTY AND

INDETERMINACY ARGUMENTS FOR REDUCED RESPONSIBILITY.

Many of the arguments designed to show that we cannot be expected to take too
much account of the effects of our actions on the distant future appeal to

uncertainty.

There are two main components to the

General Uncertainty

argument, capable of separation, but frequently tangled up.

Both arguments

are mistaken, the first, an argument from ignorance, on a priori
second on a posteriori grounds.

follows:-

grounds, the

The Argument from ignorance concerned runs as

In contrast to the exact information we can obtain about the present,

the information we can obtain about the effects of our actions on the distant
future is unreliable, woolly and highly speculative.

But we cannot base

assessments of how we should act on information of this kind, especially when

13.

accurate information is obtainable about the present which would indicate

Therefore we must regretfully ignore the uncertain effects of

different action.

our actions on the distant future.
ignorance

A striking example of the argument from

at work is afforded by official US analyses favouring nuclear

development, which ignore (the extensive) costs of
grounds of uncertainty.

More formally and crudely

waste control on the
the argument concerned is

this-

One only has obligations to the future if these obligations are based on

reliable information.
distant future.

There is no reliable information at present as regards the

Therefore one has no obligations to the distant future.

This argument is essentially a variant on a sceptical argument concerning

our knowledge of the future (formally, replace

obligations

in the crude statement of the argument above).

The main ploy is to considerably

overestimate and overstate the degree of certainty available

by

knowledge

with respect to

the present and immediate future, and the degree of certainty which is required
as the basis for moral consideration both with respect to the present and with

respect to the future.

Associated with this is the attempt to suggest a sharp

division as regards certainty between the present and immediate future on the one
hand and the distant future on the other.

We shall not find, we suggest, that

there is any such sharp or simple division between the distant future and the
adjacent future and the present, at least with respect to those things in the

present which are normally subject to moral constraints.

do act on the basis

We can and constantly

such
f/"unreliable” information, which the sceptic as regards the

future conveniently labels "uncertainty".

In moral situations in the present,

assessments of what to do often take account of risk and probability, even quite
low probabilities.

Consider again the train parable.

We do not need to know

for certain that the container will break and the lethal gas escape.

In lact

it does not even have to be probable, in the relevant sense of more probable
than not, in order for us to condemn the consigner’s action.

that there is a significant risk of harm

It is enough

in this sort of case.

It does not

matter if the decreased well-being of the consigner is certain and that the

14.

prospects of the passengers quite uncertain.

It is wrong to ship the gas.

But

if we do not require certainty of action to apply moral constraints in contemporary
affairs, why should we require a much higher standard of certainty in the future?

The unwarranted insistence on certainty as a necessary condition before moral
consideration can be given to the distant future, then, amounts to a flagrant double

standard.

According to the second argument, the Practical-uncertainty

argument,

even if in theory we have obligations to the future, we cannot in practice

take the interests of future people into account because uncertainty about

the distant future is so gross that we cannot determine what the likely

consequences of actions on it will be.

Therefore, however good our intentions

to the people of the distant future are, in practice we have no choice but to
ignore their interests.

Given that moral principles are characteristically

of universal implicational form, e.g. of forms such as "if x has character

then

x

is wrong, for every (action)

sharply thus:

x",

h

the argument may be stated more

We can never obtain the information about future actions which

would enable us to detach the antecedent of the implication.

Therefore, even

if in theory moral principles do extend to future people, in practice they cannot

be applied to obtain clear conclusions.
It is true that if the distant future really were so grossly uncertain .
that in every case it was impossible to determine in any way better than

chance what the effects of present action would be, and whether any given action
would help or hinder future people, then moral principles, although applicable

in theory to the future, would not in practice yield any clear conclusions
about how to act.

In this event the distant future would impose no practical

moral constraints on action.

However, the argument is factually incorrect in

assuming that the future always is so grossly uncertain or indeterminate.

Admittedly there is often a high degree of uncertainty concerning the distant
future, but as a matter of (contingent) fact it is not always so gross or

sweeping as the argument has to assume.

There are some areas where uncertainty is

15.

not so great as to exclude constraints on action.

For example, we may have

little idea what the fashions will be in a hundred years or, to take another

morally-irrelevant factor, what brands of ice cream people will be eating, if any,

but we do have excellent reason to believe, especially if we consider 3000 years
of history, that what people there are in a hundred years are likely to have

material and psychic needs not entirely unlike our own, that they will need
a healthy biosphere for a good life; that like us they will not be immune
to radiation; that their welfare will not be enhanced by a high incidence of

cancer or genetic defects, by the destruction of resources, or the elimination

from the face of the earth of that wonderful variety of non-human life which at

present makes it such a rich and interesting place.

The case of nuclear waste

storage, and of uncertainty of the effects of it on future people, is one

area where uncertainty in morally relevant respects is not so great as to

preclude moral constraints on action.

For this sort of reason, the

Practical uncertainty argument should be rejected.

Through the defects of the preceding arguments, we can see the defects in

a number of widely employed uncertainty arguments used to write off probable harm
to future people as outside the scope of proper consideration.

Most of these

popular moves employ both of the uncertainty arguments as suits the case,

switching from one to the other.

For example, we may be told that we

cannot really take account of future people because we cannot be sure that they

will exist or that their tastes and wants will not be completely different from

our own, to the point where they will not suffer from our exhaustion of resources

or from the things that would affect us.

But this is to insist upon complete

certainty of a sort beyond what is required for the present and immediate future,

where there is also commonly no guarantee that some disaster will not overtake
those to whom we are morally committed.

Again we may be told that there is no

guarantee that future people will be worthy of any efforts on our part, because
they may be morons of forever plugged into enjoyment

of other machines.

Even

if one is prepared to accept the elitist approach presupposed - according to which
only those who meet certain properly civilized or intellectual standards are
eligible for moral consideration ~ what we are being handed in such arguments

16.

is again a mere outside possibility.

Neither the contemporary nor the historical

situation gives any positive reason for supposing that a lapse into universal
moronity or universal-pleasure-machine escapism is a serious possibility.

We can

contrast with these mere logical possibilities the very real historically

supportable risks of escape of nuclear waste or decline of a civilisation through
destruction of its resource base.

Closely related to uncertainty arguments are arguments premissed on the
indeterminacy of the future.

For example, according to the Indeterminacy argument,_

the indeterminacy of the number and exact character of people at future times will
prevent the interest of future people being taken into account where there is a

conflict with the present.

Since their numbers are indeterminate and their interests

unknown how, it is asked, can we weigh their competing claims against those of the

present and immediate future, where this information is available in a more or less

accurate form?

The question is raised particularly by problems of sharing fixed

quantities of resources among present and future people, for example oil, when the

numbers of the latter are indeterminate.

Such problems are indeed difficult, but

they are not resolved by ignoring the claims

of the future.

Nor are distributional

problems involving non-renewable resources as large and representative a class
of moral problems concerning the future as the tendency to focus on them would

suggest.

It can be freely admitted, that there will be cases where the

indeterminacy of aspects of the future will make conflicts very difficult to

resolve or indeed irresoluble - no realistic ethical theory can give a precise

answer to every

ethical question.

But, as the train parable again illustrates,

there are cases where such difficulties do not hinder

resolution,

and

cases of conflict which are not properly approached by weighing numbers, numbers

of interests, or whatever, cases for which one needs to know only the most general
probable characteristics of future people.

The case of nuclear power is like that.

The failure of these various arguments reveals, what caiji^e independently^
argued from the universalisability features of

moral principles,

thata

disqualify future people from full moral consideration or reduce their claims

below the claims of present people.

That is, we have the same general obligations

17.

to future people as to the present;

thus there is the same obligation to take

account of them and their interests in what we do, to be careful in our actions,
to take account of the probability (and not just the certainty) of our actions
causing harm or damage, and to see, other things being equal, that we do not act
so as to rob them of what is necessary for the chance of a good life.

Uncertainty

and indeterminacy do not relieve us of these obligations.

V.

PROBLEMS OF SAFE NUCLEAR OPERATION : REACTOR EMISSIONS AND CORE MELTDOWN.

The ethical problems with nuclear power are by no means confined to waste storage

Just as remoteness in time does not erode obligations or

and future creatures.
entitlement

to just treatment, neither does location in space, or a particular

geographical position.

Hence several further problems arise, to which principles

and arguments like those already arrived at in considering the waste problem
apply.

For example, if one group (social unit,

or state) decides to dump its

radioactive wastes in the territory or region of another group, or not to prevent
its (radioactive) pollution entering the territory of another group, then it
imposes risks

and costs on presently existing people of the second group, in

much the way that present nuclear developments impose costs and risks on
future people.

There are differences however :

distant people

spatially

cannot be discounted in quite the way that future people can be, though their
interests and objectives can be ignored or overridden.

People living in the vicinity of a nuclear reactor are subject to special
costs and risks.

One is radioactive pollution, because reactors routinely discharge

radioactive materials into the air and
Emission problem.

water near

the plant : hence the

Such "normal" emission during plant operation of low level

radiation carries carcinogenic and mutagenic costs.

While there are undoubtedly

costs, the number of cancers and the precise extent of genetic damage induced
by exposure to such radiation are both uncertain.

If our

ethical principles

permitted free transfer of costs and risks from one person to another, the

ethical issue directly raised by nuclear

emissions would be :

what extent of

18.
cancer and genetic damage, if any, is permissibly traded for the advantages of

nuclear power, and under what conditions?

Since, however, risks and benefits

are NOT (morally) transferable this way - recall the Transfer-limiting

principle - such a cost-benefit approach to the risks nuclear emission poses
for those who live near a reactor cannot with justice be approached in this fashion
And these risks are

real.’

In the USA, people who live within 50 miles of a nuclear

power plant bear a risk of cancer and genetic damage of as much as 50 times that
borne by the population at large.

And children living in this region are even more

vulnerable, since they are several times more likely to contract cancer through
exposure than normal adults.

The serious costs to these people cannot be

justified by the alleged benefits for others, especially when these benefits could

be obtained without these costs.

Thus it is not just complacent to say

It s

a pity about Aunt Ethel dying of cancer, but the new airconditioners
make life comfortable’.

For such benefits to some as airconditioners

provide, which can be alternatively obtained, for example by modification of

buildings, can in no way compensate for what others suffer.
Among the other strategies used in trying to persuade us that the
imposition of radiation on minorities - most of whom have no genuine voice

in the location of reactors in their environment and cannot move away without
serious losses - is really quite alright is the Doubling argument. According
I

to the US Atomic Energy Commission, who deployed this trick, it is permissable

to double, through nuclear technology, the level of (natural) radiation that a

population ha^

received with apparently negligible consequences, the argument

being that the additional amount (being equivalent

is also

likely to have negligible consequences.

to the "natural” level)

The increased amounts of

radiation - with their large man-made component - are then accounted normal,

and, it si claimed, what is normal is morally acceptable.

in this argument is sound.

None of the steps

Drinking one bottle of wine a day may have no

ill-effects, whereas drinking two a day certainly may affect a person s well-being,
and while the smaller intake may have become normal for the person, the larger
one will, under such conditions, no t be.

Finally, what is or has become normal,

19.
e.g.

two murders or twenty cancers a day in a given city, may be far from

acceptable.
In fact, even the USA, which has very strict standards by comparison with
most other countries with planned nuclear reactors, permits radiation emissions

very substantially in excess of the standards laid down;

so the emission

situation is much worse than what consideration of the standards would
disclose.

Furthermore, the monitoring of the standards ’'imposed” is entrusted to

the nuclear operators themselves, scarcely disinterested parties.

Thus public

policy is determined not so as to guarantee public health, but rather to serve
as a ’’public pacifier” while publicly-subsidized private nuclear operations
q

proceed relatively unhamperedT

While radioactive emissions are an ordinary feature of reactor operation,
reactor breakdown is, hopefully, not: official reports even try to make an

accident of magnitude, as a matter of definition, an ’extraordinary nuclear
occurrence’.

But "definitions” notwithstanding, such accidents can happen,

and almost have on several occasions (the most notorious being Three Mile Island):
hence the Core-meltdown problem.

If the cooling and emergency core cooling systems fail in American (light
water) reactors,

then the core melts and ’containment failure’ is likely,

with the result that an area of 40,000 square miles could be radioactively

10
contaminated.
In the event of the worst type of accident in a very small
reactor, a steam explosion in the reactor vessel, about 45,000 people would be

killed Instantly and at least 100,000 would die as a result of the accident,

property damages would exceed $17 billion and an area the size of Pennsylvania
would be destroyed.

Modern nuclear reactors are about five times the size of

the reactor for which these conservative US (still the best available from
A

.
11
official sources' are given :

the consequences of a similar accident with a

modern reactor would accordingly be much greater.
The consigner who risks the lives and well-being of passengers on the
train acts

inadmissibly.

a government or government-endorsed utility

appears to act in a way that does not differ in morally significant respects in

20.

siting a nuclear reactor in a community, in planting such a dangerous package on
the "community train".

More directly, the location of a nuclear reactor in a

community, even if it should happen to receive a favourable benefit-cost

analysis and other economic appraisal, would violate such ethical requirements

as the Transfer-limiting principle.

The advocates of nuclear power have, in effect, endeavoured

to avoid

questions of cost-transfer and equity, by shifting the dispute out of the
extraordinary improbability
ethical arena and into a technological dispute about about the/
of

reactor malfunction.

They have argued, in particular, what contrasts with the

train parable, that there is no real possibility of a catastrophic nuclear
accident.

Indeed in the influential Rassmussen report - which was extensively

used to support public confidence in US nuclear fission technology - an even

stronger, an incredibly strong, improbability claim was stated:

namely, the

likelihood of a catastrophic nuclear accident is so remote as to be (almost)
impossible.

However, the mathematical models

relied upon in this report,

variously called "fault tree analysis" and "reliability estimating techniques",
are unsound, because, among other things, they exclude as "not credible"
possibilities that may well happen in the real world.

that the
It is not surprising, then,^

methodology and data of the report have been soundly and decisively criticised,

or that official support for the report has now'been withdrawn..

12

Moreover, use

of alternative methods and data indicates that there is a real possibility, a

non-negligible probability of a

serious accident.

In response it is contended that, even if there is a non-negligible

probability of a reactor accident, still that is acceptable, being of no
greater order than risks of accidents that are already socially accepted.

Here

we encounter again that insidious engineering approach to morality built into

decision models of an economic cast, e.g. benefit-cost balance sheets, risk­
assessment models, etc.

Risk assessment, a sophistication of transaction or

trade-off models, purports to provide a comparison between the relative risks
attached to different options, e.g. energy otpions, which settles their

1

21.

ethical status.

The following assumptions are encountered in risk assessment

as applied to energy options:
(

Ai.

If option a imposes (comparable) costs on fewer people than option b

then option a is preferable to option

Aii.

b ;

Option a involves a total net cost in terms of cost to people (e.g.

deaths, injuries, etc.) which is less than that of option b, which is already
/3
accepted; therefore option a is acceptable.

These assumptions are then applied as follows.

be killed

Since the number likely to

eventually
by nuclear power station catastrophe is less than the likely number

killed by cigarette smoking, and since the risks of cigarette smoking are accepted;

it follows that the risks of nuclear power are acceptable.

A little reflection

reveals that this sort of risk assessment argument grossly violates the Transfer­

limiting principle.

In order to obtain a proper ethical assessment we need

a much fuller picture, and we need to know at least these things:-

costs and benefits go to the same parties;

Do the

and is the person who voluntarily

the risks also the person who primarily receives the benefits, as in

undertakes

driving or cigarette smoking, or are the costs imposed

not benefit?

on other parties who do

It is only if the parties are the same in the case of the options

compared, and there are no such distributional problems,

a basis would be soundly based.

that a comparison on such

This is rarely 'the case, and it is not so in

the case of risk assessments of energy options.

VI.

OTHER SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL RISKS AND COSTS OF NUCLEAR DEVELOPMENT,

ESPECIALLY NUCLEAR WAR.

The problems already discussed by no means exhaust the

environmental, health and safety risks and costs in, or arising from, the nuclear
fuel cycle.

The full fuel cycle includes many stages both before and after

reactor operation, apart from waste disposal, namely,mining, milling, conversion,

enrichment and preparation, reprocessing spent fuel, and transportation of
materials.

Several of these stages involve hazards.

risks in the nuclear cycle

Unlike the special

- of sabotage of plants, of theft of fissionable

material, and of the further proliferation of nuclear armaments - these hazards

22.

have parallels, if not exact equivalents, in other highly polluting methods of

generating power, e.g.

’workers in the uranium mining industry sustain ’’the same

14
risk” of fatal and nonfatal injury as workers in the coal industry’.
The

A
problems are not

produced—by nuclear development.

Other social and environmental problems -

though endemic where dangerous

large-scale industry operates in societies that are highly inegalitarian and
include sectors that are far from affluent - are more intimately linked with the
nuclear power cycle.

Though pollution is a common and generally undesirable

component of large-scale industrial operation, radioactive pollution , such

as uranium mining for instance produces, is especially a legacy of nuclear
development, and a specially undesirable one, as rectification costs for dead
radioactive lands and waterways reveal.

Though sabotage is a threat to many

large industries, sabotage of a nuclear reactor can have dire consequences,

of a different order of magnitude from most industrial sabotage (where core

meltdown is not a possibility).

Though theft of material from more dubious

enterprises such as munitions works can pose threats to populations at large
and can assist terrorism, no thefts for allegedly peaceful enterprises pose
problems of the same order as theft of fissionable material.

No other industry

produces materials which so readily permit fabrication into such massive
explosives.

No other industry is, to sum it up,,so vulnerable on so many fronts.

In part to reduce its vulnerability, in part because of its long and

continuing association with military activities, the nuclear industry is subject
to, and encourages, several practices which (given their scale) run counter to
basic features of free and open societies, crucial features such as personal

liberty, freedom of association and of expression,and free access to information.
These practices include secrecy, restriction of information, formation of

special police and guard forces, espionage, curtailment of civil liberties.

Already operators of nuclear installations are given extraordinary
powers, in vetting employees, to investigate the background and
activities not only of employees but also of their families and
sometimes even of their friends. The installations themselves
become armed camps, which especially offends British sensibilities.
The U.K. Atomic Energy (Special Constables) Act of 1976 created a
special armed force to guard nuclear installations ami made it
answerable ...
to the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority.

23.

These developments, and worse ones in West Germany and elsewhere,presage along
with nuclear development increasingly authoritarian and anti-democratic
That nuclear development appears to force such political

societies.

consequences tells heavily against it.

Nuclear development is further indicted

politically by the direct connection of nuclear power with nuclear war.

It is

true that ethical questions concerning nuclear war - for example, whether a
nuclear war is justified, or just, under any circumstances, and if so what
circumstances - are distinguishable from those concerning nuclear power.
Undoubtedly, however, the spread of nuclear power is substantially increasing

the technical means for engaging in nuclear war and so, to that extent, the
opportunity for, and chances of, nuclear engagement.

never accounted

Since nuclear wars are

positive goods, but are at best the lesser of major evils,

nuclear wars are always highly ethically undesirable.

The spread of nuclear

power accordingly expands the opportunity for, and chances of, highly undesirable
consequences.

Finally the latter, so increasing these chances and opportunities,

is itself undesirable, and therefore what leads to it, nuclear development is

undesirable.

This is, in outline, the argument from nuclear war against

large-scale nuclear development.

VII.

CONFLICT ARGUMENTS, AND BEGINNING ON

NUCLEAR DEVELOPMENT.

UNCOVERING THE IDEOLOGICAL BASES OF

Much as with nuclear war, so given the cumulative case

against nuclear development, only one

justificatory

that of appeal to overriding circumstances.

route remains open,

That appeal, to be ethically

acceptable, must go beyond merely economic considerations.

For, as observed,

the consigner’s action, in the train parable, cannot be justified by purely
economistic

arguments, such as that his profits would rise, the company or the

town would be more prosperous, or by appealing to the fact that some possibly

uncomfortable changes would otherwise be needed.
case:

a Transfer-limiting principle applies.

So it is also in the nuclear

But suppose now the consigner argues

that his action is justified because unless it is taken the town will die.

It is

by no means clear that even such a justification as this would be sufficient,

especially where the risk to the passengers is high, since the case still
to
amounts^one of transfer of costs and risks onto others. But such a conflict
situation, where a given course of action, though normally undesirable, is
alleged to be the lesser of two evils in a given case, is morally more problemthan cases
atical^where Transfer-limiting principle is clearly violated,. Nuclear develop­
ment is often

defended

in this way, through Conflict arguments,

to

the effect that even though nuclear development does have undesirable features,
nevertheless the alternatives are worse.
Some of the arguments advanced to demonstrate conflict are based on

competing commitments to present people, and others on competing obligations
to future people, both of which are taken to override the obligations not to
impose on the future significant risk of serious harm.

The success of such

conflict arguments requires the presentation of a genuine and exhaustive set of
alternatives (or at least practical alternatives) and showing that the only

alternatives to admittedly morally undesirable actions are even more undesirable

ones.

If some practical alternative which is not morally worse than the

action to be justified is overlooked, suppressed, or neglected in the argument

(for example, if in the train parable it turns out that the town has

another

option to starving or to shipping the parcel, namely earning a living in some
other way), then the argument is defective and cannot readily be patched.

Just

such a suppression of practicable alternatives, we shall argue, has occurred in
the argument designed to show that the alternatives to the nuclear option are

even worse than the option itself.
A first argument, the Poverty argument,

is that there is an overriding

obligation to the poor, both the poor of the third world and the poor of Indus»
trialised countries.
Failure to develop nuclear energy, it is often claimed,
would amount to denying them the opportunity to reach the standard of affluence
we currently enjoy and would create unemployment and poverty in the industrialised

nations.

And this would be worse - a greater evil - than such things as violating

the Transfer-limiting principle through nuclear development.
The Poverty argument does not stand up to examination, either for the

poor of the industrial countries or for those of the third world.

There is

good evidence that large-scale nuclear energy will help increase unemployment
and poverty

in the industrial world, through the diversion of very much available

capital into an industry which is not only an exceptionally poor provider of

direct employment, but also tends to reduce available jobs through encouraging

substitution of energy use for labour use.

The argument that nuclear energy

is needed for the third world is even less convincing.

Nuclear energy is both

politically and economically inappropriate for the third world, since it requires

massive amounts of capital, requires numbers of imported scientists and engineers,

25.

—.creates negligible local employment, and depends for its feasibility upon
largely non-existent utility systems - e.g.

established electricity

transmission systems and back-up facilities, and sufficient electrical

appliances to plug into the system.

Politically it increases foreign

dependence, adds to centralised entrenched power and reduces the chance for
change in the oppressive political structures which are a large part of the

problem.

The fact that nuclear energy is not in the interests of the people

of the third world does not of course mean that it is not in the interests of,

and wanted (often for military purposes) by, their rulers, the westernised and
often military elites in whose interests the economies of these countries are
usually organised.

than what it is:

But that does not make the poverty argument anything other

a fraud.

There are well-known energy-conserving alternatives

and the practical option of developing further alternative energy sources,

alternatives some of which offer far better prospects for helping the poor,

both in the third world and in industrial countries:

coal and other fossil fuels,

geothermal, and a range of solar options (including as well as narrowly solar

sources, wind, water and tidal power).

Another major argument advanced to show conflict, the Lights-goingout argument, pppeals to a set of supposedly overriding and competing obligations

to future people.

We have, it is said, a

duty to pass on the immensely

valuable things and institutions which our culture has developed.

Unless our

high-technology, high-energy industrial society is continued and fostered, our
valuable institutions and traditions will fall into decay or be swept away.

The argument is essentially that without nuclear power, without the continued
level of material wealth it alone is assumed to make possible, the lights of

our civilization will go out.

Future people will be the losers.
>

The argument does raise important questions about what is valuable in

our society and what characteristics are necessary for a good society.

the most part these large questions can be by-passed.

But for

The reason is that the

argument adopts an extremely uncritical attitude to present high-technology

societies, apparently assuming that they are uniformly and uniquely valuable.
. it
It assumes that technological society is unmodifiable, that/cannot be changed in
the direction of energy conservation or

alternative (perhaps high technology)

energy sources without collapse.
These assumptions are all hard to accept.

The assumption that

technological society’s energy patterns are unmodifiable is especially so;

after all, it has survived events such as world wars which required major
social and technological restructuring and consumption modification.

If

western society’s demands for energy were (contrary to the evidence) totally
unmodifiable without collapse, not only would it be committed to a program
of increasing destruction, but much of its culture would be of dubious value to

future people, who would very likely, as a consequence of this destruction, lack
the resource base which the argument assumes to be essential in the case of
contemporary society.

The uniformity assumption should certainly be challenged.

Since high-

technology societies appear not to be uniformly valuable, the central

question is, what is necessary to maintain what is valuable in such a society?
While it may be easy to argue that high energy consumption centrally controlled

is necessary to maintain the political and economic status quo of such a

society, it is not so easy to argue that it is essential to maintain what is
valuable, and it is what is valuable, presumably, that we have a duty to pass on to

the future.
The evidence from history is that no very high level of material affluence

or energy consumption is needed to maintain what is valuable.

There is good

reason in fact to believe that a society with much lower energy and resource

consumption would better foster what is valuable than our own.

But even

if a radical change in these directions is independently desirable, it is
unnecessary to presuppose such a change in order to see that the assumptions of

the Lights-going-out argument are wrong.
present

The consumption of less energy than at

need involve no reduction of well-being;and certainly

a

large increase

over present levels of consumption assumed in the usual economic case for nuclear
energy, is quite unnecessary.
then

What the nuclear strategy is really designed to do

is not to prevent the lights going out in western civilisation, but to

enable the lights to go on burning all the time - to maintain and even increase

the wattage output of the Energy Extravaganza .
In fact there is good reason to think that, far from the high energy
consumption society fostering what is valuable, it will, especially if energy

is obtained by means of nuclear fission,be positively inimical to it.

which has become heavily dependent upon a

A society

highly centralised, controlled and

garrisoned, capital- and expertise-intensive energy source, must be one which is
highly susceptible to entrenchment of power, and one in which the forces which

control this energy source, whether capitalist or bureaucratic, can exert

enormous power over the political system and over people’s lives, even more
then they do at present.

Such a society would

almost inevitably tend to

become authoritarian and increasingly anti-democratic, as an outcome, among
other things, of its response to the threat posed by dissident groups in the
nuclear situation.

Nuclear development may thus help in passing on to future generations
some of the worst aspects of our society - the consumerism, alienation, destruction
of nature, and latent authoritarianism - while many valuable aspects, such as

the degree of political freedom and those opportunities for personal and
collective autonomy which exist, would be lost or diminished:

political freedom

27.

for example, is a high price to pay for consumerism and and energy extravagence.

Again, as in the case of the poverty arguments, clear alternatives,
alternative social and political choices, which do not involve such

unacceptable consequences, are available.

The alternative to the high

technology-nuclear option is not a return to the cave, the loss of all that is
valuable, but either the adoption of an available alternative such as coal for
power or, better,the development of alternative technologies and lifestyles which

offer far greater scope for the maintenance and further development of what

is valuable in our society than the highly centralised nuclear option.

The

Lights-going-out argument, as a moral conflict argument, accordingly fails.
Thus the further escape route, the appeal to conflict, is, like the
appeal to futurity, closed.

If then we apply, as we have argued we should, the

same standards of morality to the future as we ought to acknowledge for the
present, the conclusion that large-scale nuclear development is a crime against

the future is inevitable.

Closed also, in the much same way, are the escape

routes to other arguments (from reactor meltdown, radiation emissions, etc.)

for concluding that nuclear development is unacceptable.

In sum, nuclear

development is morally unacceptable on several grounds.

VIII.

SOCIAL OPTIONS : SHALLOW AND DEEP ALTERNATIVES.

The future energy option

that is most often contrasted with nuclear power, namely coal power, while no
doubt preferable to nuclear power, is hardly acceptable.

For it carries with it

the likelihood of serious (air) pollution, and associated phenomena such as
acid rain and atmospheric heating, not to mention the despoliation caused by

extensive strip mining, all of which will result from its use in meeting very

high projected consumption figures.

the Transfer-limiting principle :

Such an option would, moreover, also violate
for it would impose widespread costs on

nonbeneficiaries for some concentrated benefits to some profit takers and to

some users who do not pay the full costs of production and replacement.
To these main conventional options a third is often added which

emphasizes softer and more benign technologies, such as those of solar energy and
hydroelectricity.

Such softer options — if suitably combined with energy

conservation measures (for there are solar ways, as well as nuclear ways, of

energy extravagance and of producing unnecessary trivia which answer to no

genuine needs) - can avoid the ethical objections to nuclear power, The deeper
choice is not however technological,
nor merely^individual^, £u£ Social , and
involves the restructuring of production away from energy intensive uses and,
at a more basic level, a change to nonconsumeristic, less consumptive life­
styles and social arrangements^6 These more fundamental choices between social
alternatives, conventional technologically-oriented discussion of energy options

tends to obscure.

It is not just a matter of deciding in which way to meet the

28.
unexamined goals nuclear development aspires to meet, but also a matter of

examining the goals themselves.

That is, we are not merely faced with the

question of comparing different technologies for meeting some fixed or given
demand or level of consumption, and of trying to see how best to meet these;

we are also faced, and primarily, with the matter of examining those alleged

needs and the cost of a society that creates them.
It is doubtful that any technology, however benign in principle, will be

likely to leave a tolerable world for the future if it is expected to meet
unbounded and uncontrolled energy consumption and demands.

Even more benign

technologies may well be used in a way which creates costs for future people and
which are^5"

them.

"2?likely to result in a deteriorated world being handed on to

In short, even more benign technologies may lead to violation of the

Transmission ^2 2,1^g q u i rement.

Consider, to illustrate, the effect on the world s

forests, commonly counted as a solar resource, should they be extensively used
for production of methanol or of electricity by woodchipping.

While few would

object to the use of genuine waste material for energy production, the
unrestricted exploitation of forests -

whether it goes under the name of

"solar energy" or not - to meet ever increasing energy demands could well be
the final indignity for the world’s already hard-pressed natural forests.

The effects of such additional demands on the maintenance of the forests

are often dismissed by the simple expedient of waving around the label
"renewable resources".

Many forests are in principle renewable, it is a true,

given a certain (low) rate and kind of exploitation, but in fact there are now
very few forestry operations anywhere in the world where the forests are treated

as completely renewable in the sense of the renewal of all their values.

In

many regions too the rate of exploitation which would enable renewal has already

been exceeded, so that a total decline, is widely thought to be imminent.

It

certainly has begun in many regions, and many forest types, especially rain

forest types, are now, and rapidly, being lost for the future.

The addition of

a ma|nr^ f ur ther and not readily limitable demand pressure

for energy on top

of ^the present demands is one which anyone with both a realistic appreciation

of the conduct of forestry operations and a concern for the long-term
conservation of the forests and remaining natural communities must regard with
alarm.

The result of massive deforestation for energy purposes, resembling

the deforestation of much of Europe at the beginning of the Industrial

Revolution, again for energy purposes, could be extensive and devastating erosion
in steeper lands and tropical areas, desertification in more arid regions,

possible climatic change, and massive impoverishment of natural ecosystems,
including enormous loss of natural species.

Some of us do not want to pass on,

and by the Transmission principles we are not entitled to pass on, a deforested
world to the future, any more than we want to pass on one poisoned by nuclear

29.
products or polluted by coal products.

illustrates, a mere switch to

In short, as the forest situation

more benign technologies - important though this

is - without any more basic structural and social change, is inadequate.
The deeper social option involves challenging and beginning to alter
a social structure which promotes consumerism, consumption far beyond genuine needs,

and an economic structure which encourages increasing use of highly energy-intensive
modes of production.

The social change option

tends to be obscured in most

discussions of energy options and of how to meet energy needs, in part because
it does question underlying values of current social arrangements.

The

conventional discussion proceeds by taking alleged demand (often conflated with

wants or needs) as unchallengeable, and the issue to be one of which technology
can be most profitably employed to meet them.

This effectively presents a

false choice, and is the result of taking needs and demand as lacking a social
context

so that the social structure which produces the needs is similarly

taken as unchallengeable and unchangeable.

The point is readily illustrated.

It is commonly argued by representatives of such industries as transportation

and petroleum, as for example by McGrowth of the XS Consumption Co., that
people want deep freezers, air conditions, power gadgets, ....

authoritarian to prevent them from satisfying these wants.
from created wants

It would be

Such an argument

conveniently ignores the social framework in which such

needs and wants arise or are produced.

To point to the determination of

many such wants at the framework level is not

however to assume that they

are entirely determined at the framework level (e.g. by industrial organisation)
and there is no such thing as individual choice or determination at all.

It

is to see the social framework as a major factor in determining certain kinds
of choices, such as those for travel, and kinds, of infrastructure, and to see

apparently individual choices made in such matters as being channelled and
directed by a social framework determined largely in the interests of corporate

and private profit and advantage.
The social change option is a hard option, insofar as it will be difficult

to implement politically; but it is ultimately the only way of avoiding the

passing on of serious costs to future people.
reasons than such

ethical ones for taking it:

And there are other sorts of

it is the main, indeed the only

sort of option,open to those who adopt what is now called a deep ecological
perspective, as contrasted with a shallow

ecological outlook which regards

the natural world and its nonhuman denizens as not worthwhile in themselves but

only of value in as much as they answer back to human interests.

The deep

ecological perspective is an Integral part of the Alternative Ecological
Paradigm and is incompatible with central theses of the Dominant Social Paradigm

(which is essentially the ideology of classical and neoclassical economics)

30.
and its variants (roughly, what are called State Socialism, and Democratic
18
Socialism).
It is incompatible with such assumptions as that the natural

environment is of value only as a resource, is by and large hostile, but

is controllable in human interests,and with the further domination over
nature themes of the Dominant Paradigm and its variants.

The conflict between Alternative and Dominant Paradigms, which is

fast

increasing, extends of course far beyond attitudes to the natural world, since
core values of the Dominant Paradigm such as the merits of unimpeded economic

growth and material progress are at stake; the conflict involves fundamental
differences over the whole front of economical, political and social arrangements.

The conflict underlies much of the nuclear debate, insofar as it is not

specifically limited to questions of technological fixes, but takes up the
19
basic ethical issues and the social questions to which they lead. The
ethical requirements already defended and applied bring us out, when followed

through, on the Alternative side of the paradigm conflict, and accordingly

lead to the difficult social change option.

The social changes that the deep alternative requires will be strongly
resisted because they mean changes in current social organisation and power
structure.

To the extent that the option represents some kind of threat to

parts of present political and economic arrangements, it is not surprising that
official energy option discussion proceeds by misrepresenting and often

obscuring it.

But difficult as it is to suitably

alter "the system,"

especially one with such far-reaching effects on the prevailing power structure,

it is imperative to try:

we are all on the nuclear train.

FOOTNOTES

This paper is a condensation of an early version of our ’Nuclear

1.

power - ethical, social, and political dimensions’

(ESP for short, available

from the authors), which in turn grew out of Routley (i.e. the work so referred
to in the reference list).

For help with the condensation we are very

considerably indebted to the editors.
In the condensation, we simplify the structure of the argument and

suppress underlying political and ideological dimensions (for example, the
large measure of responsibility of the USA for spreading nuclear reactors around
the world, and thereby in enhancing the chances of nuclear disasters, including
nuclear war).

We also considerably reduce a heavy load of footnotes and

references designed and needed to help make good many of our claims.

Further,

in order to contain references to a modest length, reference to primary

sources has often been replaced by reference through secondary sources.

Little

difficulty should be encountered however in tracing fuller references through
secondary sources or in filling out much important background material from
work cited herein.

For example, virtually all the data cited in sections^ and VII

is referenced in Routley.

At worst ESP can always be consulted.

All but the last line of the quote is drawn from Goodin, p. 417;

2.

the last line is from the Fox Report, p. 6.
While it is unnecessary to know much about the nuclear fuel cycle

in order to consider ethical and social dimensions of nuclear power, it

helps to know a little.

The basics are presented in many texts, e.g. Nader

Of course in order to assess fully reports as to such
I
important background and stage-setting matters as the likelihood of a

& Abbotts, Gyorgy.

core meltdown of

(lightwater) reactors, much more information is required.

For many assessment purposes however, some knowledge of economic fallacies
and decision theory is at least as important as knowledge of nuclear

technology.

3.

Naturally the effect on humans is not the only factor that has

to be taken into account in arriving at moral assessments.

Nuclear radiation,

unlike most ethical theories, does not confine its scope to human life and

welfare.

But since the harm

nuclear development may afflict on non­

human life, for example, can hardly improve

its case, it suffices if the case

against it can be made out solely in terms of its effects on human life in the

conventional way.

For reference to and a brief discussion of (human-oriented)
simulation models

p.428.

The Opportunity-cost

4.

respects.

see Goodin,

argument is also defective in other

It presupposes not merely the (mistaken) reductions involved in the

contraction of the ethical domain to the economic; it also presupposes that the

proper methods for decision which affect the
choice, apply discounting.

future, such as that of energy

But, as Goodin argues, more appropriate decision

rules do not allow discounting.
This is one of the reasons why expected utility theory,

5.

roughly cost-benefit analysis with probability frills, is inadequate as a
decision method in such contexts.
Apparent exceptions to the principle such as taxation (and

6.

redistribution of income generally) vanish when wealth is construed (as
it has to be if taxation is to be properly justified) as at least partly a social
asset unfairly monopolised by a minority of the population.

Examples such

as that of motoring dangerously do not constitute counterexamples to the

principle; for one is not morally entitled to so motor.
7.

For details, and as to how the official analyses become arguments

against nuclear development when some attempt is made to take the ignored
costs into account, see Shrader-Frechette, p. 55 ff.
8.

See Routley, p. 160.

9.

For much further discussion of the points of

the preceding two para-

»

graphs, see Shrader-Frechette, p. 35 ff.; and also Nader

10.

&

Abbotts.

Most of the reactors in the world are of this type;

see

Gyorgy.
11.

See Shrader-Frechette, chapter 4.

12.

See Shrader-Frechette.

shortcomings

A worthwhile initial view of the

of the Rassmussen report may be reached by combining

the critique in Shrader-Frechette with that in Nader
13.

There are variations on Ai

against numbers such as probabilities.

and Aii

&

Abbotts.

which multiply costs

In this way risks, construed as

probable costs, can be taken into account in the assessment.
risks may be assessed

(Alternatively,

through such familiar methods as insurance).

A principle varying
.
*
Aii

a

Aii, and formulated as follows:

is ethically acceptable if (for some b) a includes no more

risks than b and b is socially accepted.
was the basic ethical principle in terms of which the Cluff

Lake Board of Inquiry recently decided that nuclear power development
see Cluff Lake Board of Inquiry

in Saskatchewan is ethically acceptable:

Department of Environment, Government of Saskatchewan, 1978,

Final Report,

p. 305 and p. 288.

In this report, a

is nuclear power and

b

is either

activities clearly accepted by society as alternative power sources.

other applications

b

In

has been taken as cigarette smoking, motoring,

mining and even the Vietnam war () .
The points made in the text do not exhaust the objections to
principles

Ai - Aii’.

The principles are certainly ethically substantive,

since an ethical consequence cannot be deduced from nonethical premisses,

but they have an inadmissible conventional

origin of b

:

b

character.

For look at the

may be socially accepted though it is no longer socially

acceptable, or though its social acceptibility is no longer so clearcut
and it would not have been socially accepted if as much as is now known

had been known when it was introduced.

What is required in Aii’, for

instance, for the argument to begin to look convincing is that
’ethically acceptable’

rather than

’socially accepted'.

b

is

But even

with the amendments the principles are invalid, for the reasons given in
the text, and others.

It is not disconcerting that principles of this type do not work.
It would be sad to see yet another area lost to the experts, ethics to

actuaries.
14.

See Shrader-Frechette, p. 15.

15.

Goodin

16.

The argument is elaborated in ESP.

17.

For some of the more philosophically important material on

p. 433.

alternative nonconsumeristic

.social arrangements and lifestyles, see

work cited in V. and R. Routley, 'Social theories, self management and

environmental problems’ in Mannison et al, where a beginning is made
on working out one set of alternatives, those of a pluralistic anarchism.

The parlous

18.

situation of the world’s tropical rainforests is

explained in, for instance, Myers; the reasons are untangled in R. and V.

Routley ’World rainforest destruction - the social causes’

(available from

the authors).

For a fuller account of the Dominant Social Paradigm and its

19.

rival,

the Alternative Environmental Paradigm, see

Cotgrove and Duff, especially

_ the main

the table on p. 341 which encapsulates

of the

assumptions

paradigms; compare also Catton and Dunlap, especially p. 34.

Contemporary variants ^.n the Dominant Social Paradigm wer-e considered in ESP.

-X

The shallow/deep contrast as applied to ecological positions, which

is an important component of the paradigm conflict, was introduced by Naess.
For further explanation of the contrast and of the larger array of ecological

positions into which it fits, see R. and V. Routley,

environmental ethics' in Mannison
especially to Rodman’s
20.

’Human chauvinism and

et al, and the references there cited,

work.

The more elaborate argument of ESP sets the nuclear debate in the

context of paradigm conflict.

But it is also argued that, even within

assumptions framework of the Dominant Social Paradigm and its variants,
Ti.

Nuclear development is not the rational choice among energy options.

The main argument put up for nuclear development within the framework of

the dominant paradigm is an Economic growth argument.

It is

the

following

version of the Lights-going-out argument (with economic growth duly standing

in for material wealth, and for what is valuable.’
necessary to sustain economic growth.

Nuclear power is

Economic: growth is desirable (for

all the usual reasons, e.g. to increase the size of the pie, to postpone
redistribution problems, etc.).

Therefore nuclear power is desirable.

The first premiss is part of US energy policy (see Shrader-Frechette, p.lll),

and the second premiss is supplied by standard economics textbooks.

But both

premisses are defective, the second because what is valuable in economic

growth can be achieved by (not without growth but) selective
growth, which jettisons

economic

the heavy social and environmental costs carried

by unqualified economic growth.

More to the point, since the second premiss

is an assumption of the Dominant Paradigm, the first premiss (or rather an
fails even by Dominant

appropriate and less vulnerable restatement of it)
Paradigm standards.

For of course nuclear power is not necessary

that there are other, perhaps costlier alternatives.
defended is some elaboration of the premiss :

given

The premiss usually

Nuclear power is the

economically best way to sustain economic growth,

’economically best’

being filled out as ’most efficient’, ’cheapest’,

benefit-cost ratio’, etc.

’having the most favourable

Unfortunately for the argument, and for nuclear

development schemes, nuclear power is none of these things decisively

(unless a

good deal of economic cheating - easy to do - is done).
Tii-

On proper Dominant Paradigm accounting, nuclear choices should

generally be rejected, both as private utility investments and as

public choices.
Nuclear development is not economically viable but has been kept going, not

by clear economic viability, but by massive subsidization of several types

(discussed in Shrader-Flechette, Gyorgy and Nader & Abbotts).
Even on variants of the Dominant Paradigm, nuclear development is
not justified, as consideration of decision theory methods will reveal:

Tiii.

Whatever reasonable decision rule is adopted, the nuclear choice is

rej ected f

as the arguments of Goodin on ^Alternative decision rules help to show.
What sustains the nuclear juggernaut is not the Dominant Paradigm

or its variants, but contemporary corporate capitalism (or its state enterprise
image) and associated third world imperialism, as the historical details of nuclear

development both in developed countries and in less developed countries makes plain
(for main details, see Gyorgy p. 307 ff.).

the practices of contemporary

Ayi

corporate capitalism and associated imperialism are not acceptable by the
standards of either of the Paradigms or their variants :

not ethically acceptable.

,

they are certainly

<0

O

to

REFERENCES USED

Works especially useful for further investigation of the ethical issues
raised by nuclear development are indicated with an asterisk (*
).

S. C^yove. and A. Duff, ’’Environmentalism, middle-class radicalism and
politics’, Sociological Review

28(2) (1980), 333-51.

W. R. Catton, Jr., and R. E. Dunlap, ’A new ecological paradigm for post
exuberant sociology’ American Behavioral Scientist 24 (1980).

15-47.

For Report :

Ranger Uranium Environmental Inquiry First Report,

Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, 1977.
*R. E. Goodin, "No moral nukes’, Ethics 90 (1980), 417-49.
*A. Gyorgy and friends,

No Nukes : everyone’s guide to nuclear power,

South End Press, Boston, Mass., 1979.

*D. Mannison, M. McRobbie and R. Routley (editors), Environmental Philosophy,
RSSS, Australian National University, 1980.

N. Myers, The Sinking Ark,

Pergamon Press, Oxford, 1979.

R. Nader and J. Abbotts, The Menace of Atomic Energy,

Outback Press,

Melbourne, 1977.

*K. S. Shrader-Frechette, Nuclear Power and Public Policy,

Reidel, Dordrecht,

1980.preferred Lo as SF)T~"
R. and V. Routley,

’Nuclear energy and obligations to the future’, Inquiry

21 (1978), 133-79.