Doug Sax on wire
On Thu, 08 Nov 2007 07:18:51 GMT, "Paul Stamler"
wrote:
The question, which science cannot answer, is this: Is it worth sacrificing
the lives of those children (and the suffering of their families) to improve
the general condition of the community? Science can provide a lot of
information: it can tell you what pollutants are emitted from the plant, and
what their physiological effect is, and it can predict the number of deaths
(given enough data about similar installations in the past). It can also
make a stab at predicting how much economic good will result from the
factory, and how much the standard of living will rise because of it, and
what effect the rise in standard of living will have.
A dilemma which we avoided due to ignorance while building our
industrial wealth, but with which we can now torture emerging
economies who can't yet afford such scruples.
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