Research Commentary Ethical Perspectives for Public and Environmental Health: Fostering Autonomy and the Right to Know
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper we develop an ethical perspective for public and environmental health practice in consideration of the “right to know ” by contrasting consequential and deontological perspectives with relational ethics grounded in the concept of fostering autonomy. From the consequential perspective, disclosure of public and environmental health risks to the public depends on the expected or possible consequences. We discuss three major concerns with this perspective: respect for persons, justice, and ignorance. From a deontological perspective, the “right to know ” means that there is a “duty ” to communicate about all public health risks and consideration of the principles of prevention, precaution, and environmental justice. Relational ethics develops from consideration of a mutual limitation of the traditional perspectives. Relational ethics is grounded in the relationship between the public and public/environmental health providers. In this paper we develop a model for this relationship, which we call “fostering autonomy through mutually respectful relationships. ” Fostering autonomy is both an end in public health practice and a means to promote the principles of prevention, precaution, and environmental justice. We discuss these principles as they relate to practical issues of major disasters and contaminants in food, such as DDT, toxaphene, chlordane, and mercury. Key words: Canada, chlordane, DDT, environmental justice, fostering autonomy, mercury, precautionary principle, prevention, right to know, toxaphene. Environ Health Perspect 111:133–137 (2003). [Online 25 October 2002] doi:10.1289/ehp.4477 available via
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.025 | 0.076 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.035 | 0.019 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.025 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".