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Blackwell Publishing LtdOxford, UKEIAEthics & International Affairs

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6794

©

2006

Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs

201

Original Article

recent books on ethics and international affairsrecent books on ethics and international affairs

Recent Books on Ethics and International Affairs

Laws of Fear: Beyond the Precautionary Principle

,

C

S

R

K

S

-F

123

International Governance of War-Torn Territories: Rule and Reconstruction

,

R

C

R

T. K. V

125

Worlds Apart: Measuring International and Global Inequality

, B

M

R

C

M

128

Producing Security: Multinational Corporations, Globalization, and theChanging Calculus of Conflict

,

S

G. B

R

Q

L

130

Shaping Race Policies: The United States in Comparative Perspective

,

R

L

R

E

B

133

In the House of the Hangman: The Agonies of German Defeat, 1943–1949

,J

K. O

R

F

B

135

123

Laws of Fear: Beyond the Precautionary Principle

, Cass Sunstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2005

),

234

pp., $

23

.

99

cloth.

For fifty years the industrial and medicalcommunities have battled over pollution.Researchers from industry-funded thinktanks, such as the American Enterprise Insti-tute (AEI), claim people are irrational to fearpollution when more deaths are caused bysmoking and drinking. They say the mediapromotes pollution hysteria and that economicgrowth—not growth-hindering pollutionregulation—is often a better health-promoter,since wealthier groups are healthier.

In contrast, while medical scientists suchas those affiliated with the World HealthOrganization, the National Cancer Insti-tute (NCI), and the

New England Journal ofMedicine

agree that a third of cancers arecaused by tobacco, they claim this is noexcuse for ignoring the fact that every year atleast

60

,

000

fatal cancers and additionalheart-related deaths in the United States arecaused by industrial toxins. For the pasttwenty-five years, children’s cancers havebeen increasing at

1

.

4

percent annually—

140

percent faster than adult rates. Now,

40

per-cent of cancers occur in people under the ageof sixty-five. Physicians agree that betterdiagnosis explains only a tiny part of theseincreases.

Defending the former side in the industry-versus-medicine debate, in

Laws of Fear

,Cass Sunstein has included parts of earlierarticles, such as ten working papers he didfor the AEI

.

The first four chapters claimthat because people are “irrational,” ignorantvictims of “panic, hysteria, terror,” “alarmistbias,” and “baseless fear” of pollution (pp.

54

,

86

;

56

,

91

;

82

;

105

), they “overreact” to tinyindustrial risks and erroneously support theprecautionary principle. Used in regulatingpollution, mostly in Europe for the last fourdecades, this better-safe-than-sorry princi-

ple is that “regulators should take steps toprotect against potential harms, even if thecausal chains are unclear” (p.

4

).The second half of the book offers three

solutions to alleged public irrationality. Thefirst solution is to adopt an “anti-catastrophe”principle that limits precaution to potentiallycatastrophic pollution deaths. Sunstein’ssecond solution, based on his “cognitivecase for cost-benefit analysis” as “a naturalcorrective” to human irrationality aboutpollution (p.

129

), is that regulators should“choose the least costly means of achievingtheir ends” (p.

115

).Sunstein’s third solution is “libertarian

paternalism,” having government or private“planners” follow “market pressures” (p.

179

)in imposing lenient pollution regulations as“sensible correctives” to public irrationality(pp.

203

,

199

–

200

,

187

–

88

). Planners would“structure the relevant [regulatory] optionsin a way that will steer people away fromdecisions that capitulate to unjustified fear”(p.

180

), thus carefully controlling and evenwithholding from the public some informa-tion about pollutant risks (p.

195

). Plannerswould allow citizens “to depart from thedefault plan” of allowing more pollution,provided citizens are willing to pay some-times “significant costs” for health protec-tion (pp.

202

,

200

,

196

).While Sunstein is right to emphasize

cost–benefit analysis and avoid misguideddesires for security to interfere with civilliberties, his paternalistic “natural corrective”to alleged public irrationality relies on manyanti-democratic, anti-egalitarian presuppo-sitions. These include his denying “thatindividual choices should be respected,” hisaffirming that “freedom of choice shouldsometimes be denied altogether” (pp.

181

,

124

202

), and his assuming that citizensshould not be told of pollution risks ifgovernment thinks they would respondirrationally (pp.

195

,

123

–

26

).Regarding cost–benefit analysis, Sunstein

claims people deserve protection from catas-trophes but must be “willing to pay” to avoidsmall industrial risks—such as those that kill

100

in every million people (pp.

161

–

62

,

202

). He admits that using willingness-to-pay would cause the lives of wealthy anddeveloped-country citizens to be valued aboutten times higher than those of poor people(pp.

162

–

66

), but claims that seeking “the‘same’ protection . . . is an error” that harmsthe poor because monies spent on pollu-tion regulation cannot be spent on eco-nomic production that can presumablyalleviate poverty (p.

166

). Instead of grap-pling with the classical ethical and economicarguments and extensive literature on thesecontroversial assumptions, Sunstein repeat-edly appeals to question-begging libertarianand polluter claims—for example, thatpollution “regulation amounts to a forcedexchange” (p.

151

).In rejecting democratic decision-making

among allegedly irrational citizens, Sunsteinuses five “anchoring” examples (also repeat-edly used by industry-funded groups suchas AEI) as evidence of citizen irrationalityabout small risks. These are geneticallyengineered food, nuclear power, arsenic indrinking water, global warming, and risks tomarine mammals. In none of these casesdoes Sunstein cite classic scientific literatureor arguments. Instead, he uses question-begging claims about beneficial—that is, lessregulated—economic growth.

For instance, claiming that people “over-react” to genetic modification of food (p.

86

),Sunstein condemns Zambia’s “palpablyabsurd”

2002 rejection of genetically modifiedcorn and asserts that these “precautions”

risked African starvation (pp. 31, 224).Sunstein fails to tell the reader, however,that no commercially available geneticallyengineered seeds (GES) increase yield,nutritional value, or drought tolerance.He also fails to mention that 80 percent ofGES are produced by chemical companiesto make plants resistant to otherwise-lethalherbicides, so that farmers using patentedGES can cut labor costs by increasing the useof chemicals—provided they sign contractsto use only GES-company herbicides. Sun-stein also fails to reveal that humans arenot resistant to higher levels of food-bornechemical residues; that the most usedchemical, Roundup, has been implicatedin many cancers, including non-Hodgkinslymphoma; that GES have extinguishedmany developing world crop species andcaused human deaths, diseases, fatal allergicreactions, outbreaks of herbicide-resistantweeds, biomagnification of toxins, and plantand animal poisonings. Sunstein likewisefails to reveal that the European Unionrejected GES after documenting these effects;that the use of GES increases seed costs andchemical dependence; and that, at a recentUN Food and Agriculture Organizationmeeting, eighteen African nations con-demned gene technologies for underminingtheir capacity to feed themselves. Ignoringall this, Sunstein uses only two sources tosupport GES benefits, the Cato Institute(p. 81)—funded partly by GES chemicalcompanies—and Monsanto’s court case againstItaly for rejecting Monsanto’s Roundup-dependent corn as unsafe (pp. 22–23).

Unfortunately, the scientific errors char-acterizing Sunstein’s GES claims typify hisother four “citizen-irrationality” examples.In the case of nuclear energy, while Sunsteinrepeatedly condemns nuclear critics, hefails to reveal that classic U.S. governmentstudies (WASH 740, WASH 1400) establish

125

a one-in-five probability of core-melt, pos-sible deaths of 150,000 people, and possibledestruction of a Pennsylvania-sized area.Nor does Sunstein tell readers that becausenuclear insurance is so expensive, govern-ment (through the Price-Anderson Act) hasgiven nuclear industries liability protectionagainst more than 98 percent of citizens’damages from possible accidents. If nuclearrisks really are tiny, industry has no need ofPrice-Anderson. If they are catastrophic,Sunstein is wrong to criticize nuclear oppo-nents, and he contradicts himself in promot-ing both nuclear energy and his “anti-catastrophe principle.”

Attorney Sunstein is best when he dis-cusses law, as in the last fifteen pages of hisbook, where he raises important questionsabout trading civil liberties for security. Hisscientifically uninformed personal attacks

on allegedly irrational laypeople, however,ignore the message and kill the messenger.They forget that even if people are irration-ally fearful, pollution gores their ox. Toattack victims while avoiding careful analysisof their claims about pollutant threats, likenuclear power, misses the fundamentalpoint of justice and law: Those who profitfrom putting others at risk ought to takeresponsibility for doing so.

If Sunstein wants to accuse people ofirrationality, just as the tobacco industry didin defending cigarettes, he should followstandard conflict-of-interest norms. Research-ers with tobacco ties are now required todisclose them to editors. Sunstein’s bookshould have disclosed his long-standing tiesto groups like AEI.

—K S-F

University of Notre Dame

International Governance of War-Torn Territories: Rule and Reconstruction, Richard Caplan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 291 pp., $99 cloth.

Our post–Cold War world has seen aremarkable renaissance of the idea oftrusteeship—the notion that the internationalcommunity should administer war-tornterritories until they can govern themselves.In Bosnia-Herzegovina, Eastern Slavonia,Kosovo, and East Timor, the UN or interna-tional ad hoc bodies did not just keep thepeace—not even according to more recent,expansive definitions of “complex” or“multidimensional” peacekeeping. Rather,they embarked on the formidable task ofrebuilding political authority while acting asde facto governments until that goal wasachieved. Indeed, as Richard Caplan explainsat the outset of his comparative study, theseand other international administrationshave, to various degrees, gone beyond earlierpeace missions to “make and enforce local

laws, exercise total fiscal management of aterritory, appoint and remove public offi-cials, create a central bank, establish andmaintain customs services, regulate the localmedia, adjudicate rival property claims, runschools, regulate local businesses, and recon-struct and operate all public utilities” (p. 2).

We are now sufficiently removed in timefrom the main phases of these projects—theinternational high representative in Bosniais likely to depart in the second half of 2006,Kosovo may be about to be granted somesort of independence, East Timor has beenfully sovereign since 2002, and EasternSlavonia was handed back to the control ofthe Croatian government in January 1998—to assess how successful they have been inachieving their goals. But there is a seriousdifficulty any comparative study of these