Health and environment regulation: Ethical standards of evidence

The regulation of health and environmental hazards is coercive to the point of imposing substantial fines and even detention to transgressors. In free societies, those regulations have ethical standing if grounded on the scientific evidence of physical measurements relevant to what is being protected including humans, or on transparent use and benefit tradeoffs. These requirements are commonly observed for risks and hazards that are present and measurable, and they sustain much of current regulations that remain uncontroversial. By contrast, most supposable distant risks that cannot be measured are currently regulated on the basis of arbitrary and very costly assumptions of evidence, simulated as if relevant, objective and scientific. Such illusory assumptions are enforced to impart an ersatz moral authority to regulations, which in reality end up as the opaque condensations of political and bureaucratic pressures. The common outcome of such pressures is regulations that whimsically sanction the most minimal exposures that still allow practical applications. Such official misrepresentations of evidence are intolerable and should be removed, because only relevant and factually measured evidence provides moral standing to regulations. When that evidence is not possible, precautionary minimal exposures compatible with necessary applications should be ethically defined by reasoned and transparent use and benefits tradeoffs.