The King’s Green Pad

Yesterday I took part in a forum on nuclear power in Alberta. The forum followed a report to which I contributed (www.ualberta.ca/ERSC). I’m no expert on nuclear energy, but I was asked to apply a sociological perspective to the topic. More specifically, I was asked to write about the ETHICS of nuclear power. You know, get the religious guy to talk about that, because religion is about morality right? (First off, I’ll say, religion is more than that; more on that sometime else, perhaps)

Here’s a summary of what I wrote for the report and said at the forum:

Decision-making is ethics.

Decision-making draws on facts as best determined by good information. In this report we have discussed some of the economic and social aspects of the issue, and other reports add information about health and engineering. But these cannot make the decisions. Decision-making IS ethics, because decisions involve deciding what ends are sought and what means will be used to get there.

My first point is that decision-making often makes declarations of The Highest Good, but too often makes them implicit. All decisions involve ethical choices because they all imply what is The Good.

Focus primarily on economic growth makes implicit declaration of The Good. That is, the good is money (A “rising tide” doesn’t lift all boats – economic growth does not automatically create jobs or wealth for all).

Focus primarily on energy demand also makes implicit declaration of The Good. That is, the good is gratification of desire – namely, energy-intensive lifestyles.

In this nuclear decision process, narrowing information inputs to purely technical matters makes declarations of The Good. That is, the good is whatever we can technologically accomplish.

My second point is that the ethics of nuclear power revolves less around the yes or no decisions about nuclear power – as important as these are – but on the ethical processes by which public deciding will be made of whether nuclear and how it would be run. In some very important ways, the answer to “What is the Good” is answered “By Being Good.” The decision process about such a weighty issue should be a Good process, which many citizens doubt can happen fairly.

Finally, let me point out a bigger picture to all of this. Ethics is about carefully determining What is The Good. We should be asking some important questions about what The Good Life entails.

The bigger questions of nuclear energy include whether there are legitimate limits to what human ingenuity should try to accomplish. Is it good for humans to do whatever they want to try to technologically achieve?

Only slightly smaller in scope is the question “Why do we want/need nuclear energy?” The typical answer – “to fill needs [sic] for electricity” is no real answer. An ethical stance is to query whether these energy “needs” are really desires or demands. From classical philosophers and biblical writers to the present, the Good was not to be determined solely on USE VALUE to meet human preferences, desired, needs and perceived needs.

Our energy dependent lifestyles have an ecological footprint (http://pubs.pembina.org/reports/51.Ecological%20Footprint.pdf ) that outstrips nearly all other humans on the planet, as well as the available resources of the planet. Is that energy-intensive lifestyle good? Is it good for us; is it good for the Albertan environment or the global biosphere? And, is it fair? That is, does our energy and resource consumption help produce inequities elsewhere on the globe (http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11032)?

The Good Life is not only about ever-increasing energy demands. In fact, if the data on resources and sustainability are any indication, that’s exactly the opposite from what the long term Higher Good is. A discussion on the bigger picture of What is Good and Where is Alberta Going, is as desperately needed as a discussion of nuclear power.

This post was authored by Dr. Randolph Haluza-Delay, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the King’s University College and editor of the recently released volume Speaking for Ourselves: Environmental Justice in Canada.