Abstract
It is a truism that the wise person is not necessarily known by the answers he gives, but by the way he formulates the questions. Perhaps this is because even the best of us often cannot resolve a problem when it has been formulated in terms of the wrong questions.
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Notes
See J. M. Deutsch and the Interagency Review Group on Nuclear Waste Management, Report to the President, TID-2817, National Technical Information Service, Springfield, Va., October, 1978; hereafter cited as: IRG, Report.
K. Keniston, ‘Toward a More Human Society’, in Contemporary Moral Issues (ed. H. K. Girvetz), Wadsworth, Belmont, Calif., 1974, pp. 401–402.
See J. J. Stukel and B. R. Keenan, Ohio River Basin Energy Study Report, vol. 1, Research Grant R804848–01, US Environmental Protection Agency, Washington, D.C., 1977; hereafter cited as: Stukel and Keenan, ORBES. The author served on this TA team and has first-hand knowledge of its work.
Robert Stobaugh and Daniel Yergin, ‘Conclusion: Toward a Balanced Energy Program’, in Energy Future (ed. by Stobaugh and Yergin), Random House, New York, 1979, p. 277. See also Yergin, ‘Conservation: The Key Energy Source’, in Energy Future (ed. by Stobaugh and Yergin), pp. 136–182
US Congress, OTA, Technology Assessment of Changes in the Future Use and Characteristics of the Automobile Transportation System, 2 vols., US Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1979. See vol. l, p. 16; hereafter cited as OTA, Auto.
See note 17.
K. E. Boulding, ‘Fun and Games with the Gross National Product: the Role of Misleading Indicators in Social Policy’, in Environment and Society (ed. by R. T. Roelofs, J. N. Crowley, and D. L. Hardesty, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1974, p. 136.
Stobaugh and Yergin, ‘The End of Easy Oil’, in Energy Future (ed. Stobaugh and Yergin), pp. 4–11. See also Stobaugh and Yergin, ‘Conclusion’, p. 227 (note 3).
In addition to the automobile and energy studies already cited, see, for exmaple, US Congress, OTA, A Technology Assessment of Coal Slurry Pipelines, US Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1978, where ethical, legal, and social parameters involved in use of slurries are disregarded; hereafter cited as OTA, Coal.
See also US Congress, OTA, Policy Implications of the Computed Tomography (CT) Scanner, US Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1978, which neglected to consider alternative social, regulatory, legal, political, and ethical frameworks within which the scanners might best be used and misuse avoided. The same failure to evaluate alternative social, political, and ethical frameworks within which a technology is used, or within which environmental impacts occur, appears in nearly all assessments.
See, for example, (1) US Atomic Energy Commission, Comparative Risk-Cost-Benefit Study of the Alternative Sources of Electrical Energy, WASH-1224, US Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1974; hereafter cited as AEC, Risk
(2) Congress, OTA, An Evaluation of Railroad Safety, US Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1978; hereafter cited as OTA, Railroad
(3) Congress, OTA, Pest Management Strategies, vol. 3, US Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1979; hereafter cited as OTA, Pest.
The one significant exception to this rule is US Congress, OTA, Application of Solar Technology To Today’s Energy Needs, vol. 1, US Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1975; hereafter cited as OTA, Solar, in which alternative social, political, and ethical frameworks are considered.
In this regard, see K. S. Shrader-Frechett, Environmental Ethics, Boxwood Press, Pacific Grove, Calif., 1981, pp. 154–194.
Ibid., p. 162.
G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1951, p. 40.
A discussion of this error, as applied to assessment of nuclear fission, may be found in Shrader-Frechette, Nuclear Power and Public Policy, D. Reidel, Boston, 1983, pp. 136–137.
Moore, Principia Ethica, pp. 23–24; see also p. 36. Although Moore argues that ethical judgments ought not be reduced to purely scientific ones, he does not deny that causal or empirical propositions are a part of ethics. In this regard, see F. Snare, ‘Three Skeptical Theses in Ethics’, American Philosophical Quarterly 14 (2), (1977), 129–130.
For discussion of this point, see Stukel and Keenan, ORBES, IV (1978), pp. 50 ff.
For example, one of the forms the naturalistic fallacy has taken is the attempt to derive ‘ought’ statements from ‘is’ statements. This definition of the fallacy is controversial, in large part, because it appears to presuppose a fact-value distinction. In this regard, see J. R. Searle, ‘How to Derive “Ought” from “Is”’, Philosophical Review 73 (1), (1964): 43–58. See also Moore, Principia Ethica, pp. 73, 108. A number of philosophers (e.g., Bruening, Frankena, White, as well as Snare), however, do not believe that the naturalistic fallacy is committed whenever one attempts to derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’.
See, for example, L. Kohlberg, ‘From Is to Ought: How to Commit the Naturalistic Fallacy and Get Away with It...’, in Cognitive Development and Epistemology, (ed. T. Mischel), Academic Press, New York, 1971, p. 154. Failing to consider the open question has also been considered by authors such as Kohlberg and Giarelli to be another variant of the naturalistic fallacy.
See J. M. Giarelli, ‘Lawrence Kohlberg and G. E. Moore’, Educational Theory 26 (4), (1976), 350. This variant is also controversial, however, because not all philosophers are willing to challenge the analyticity of definitions of good.
US Congress, OTA, Annual Report to the Congress for 1978, US Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1978, p. 73.
Shaul Ben-David (Department of Economics, University of New Mexico), Allen V. Kneese, Resources for the Future, Washington, D.C.), and William D. Schulze (Department of Economics, University of Wyoming), ‘A Study of the Ethical Foundations of Benefit-Cost Analysis Techniques’, unpublished research done under NSF-EVIST funding, working paper, August 1979, p. 130.
Stukel and Keenan, ORBES, I (1917).
See US Congress, OTA, Railroad Safety — US—Canadian Comparison, US Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1979, pp. vii—viii. See also OTA, Railroad, esp. pp. 14, 37, 141, 156.
Robert Van Den Bosch, The Pesticide Conspiracy, Doubleday, Garden City, 1978, pp. 147–151; see also pp. 152–178. The late Van Den Bosch, a Berkeley entomologist, spent his life doing research on nonchemical forms of pest control.
See Goran Backstrand and Lars Ingelstam, ‘Should We Put Limits on Consumption?’ The Futurist 11 (3), (1977), pp. 157–162.
See OTA, Auto.
See M. R. McDowell and D. F. Cooper, ‘Control Methodology of the UK Road Traffic System’, in Environmental Assessment of Socioeconomic Systems (ed. D. Burkhardt and W. Ittelson), Plenum, New York, 1978, pp. 279–280. Cf. OTA, Auto, Vol. 1, pp. 16, 21–25, 31.
Core-melt probabilities were computed in the only allegedly complete study of nuclear-reactor safety, WASH-1400, known as the Rasmussen Report. Released in 1975, this study concluded that fission reactors presented only a minimal health threat to the public. Early in 1979, however, under growing knowledge of core-melt hazards, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission withdrew its support from WASH-1400. See US NRC, Reactor Safety Study, WASH-1400, NUREG-75/014, US Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1975. See also Shrader-Frechette, Nuclear Power, pp. 3–4.
OTA, Solar, vol. l, p. 11.
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© 1985 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Shrader-Frechette, K.S. (1985). The Fallacy of Unfinished Business. In: Science Policy, Ethics, and Economic Methodology. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-6449-5_4
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