Kristin Shrader‐frechette
Biographic Data
| ID | 3893686 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kristin Shrader‐frechette |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kristin |
| FAMILY NAME | Shrader‐frechette |
| SIGNATURE | FRECHETTE K S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Notre Dame |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1063-7684 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 64 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 67 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 64 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1977 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2022 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Does Hazardous-Waste Testing Follow Technical Guidance, Thus Help Protect Environmental Justice and Health
Does representative hazardous-waste-site testing tend to follow or to violate government technical guidance? This is an important question, because following such guidance promotes reliable risk analysis, adequate remediation, and environmental-justice and -health protection. Yet only government documents typically address this question, usually only when it is too late, when citizens have already exhibited health harm, allegedly from living or w…
Data-Quality Assessment Signals Toxic-Site Safety Threats and Environmental Injustices
Most hazardous-waste sites are located in urban areas populated by disproportionate numbers of children, minorities, and poor people who, as a result, face more severe pollution threats and environmental-health inequalities. Partly to address this harm, in 2017 the United Nations unanimously endorsed the New Urban Agenda, which includes redeveloping urban-infill-toxic-waste sites. However, no systematic, independent analyses assess the public-hea…
Section 1. Staking Out a Territory
Protecting Children from Toxic Waste: Data-Usability Evaluation Can Deter Flawed Cleanup
Nearly 25 percent of US children live within 2 km of toxic-waste sites, most of which are in urban areas. They face higher rates of cancer than adults, partly because the dominant contaminants at most US hazardous-waste sites include genotoxic carcinogens, like trichloroethylene, that are much more harmful to children. The purpose of this article is to help protect the public, especially children, from these threats and to improve toxics-remediat…
Dispelling Stem‐Cell Ideology
Week‐old embryos are considered the richest source of stem cells usable in medical treatments. Because the embryos are destroyed when the stem cells are removed, the debate over the embryo's legal, moral, political, and scientific status has exploded. In this debate, Sheldon Krimsky's Stem Cell Dialogues: A Philosophical and Scientific Inquiry into Medical Frontiers (Columbia UP, 2015) is the single best book. Evenhanded, eminently readable, up t…
Tainted: How Philosophy of Science Can Expose Bad Science
Lawyers often work pro bono to liberate death-row inmates from flawed legal verdicts that otherwise would kill them. This is the first book on practical philosophy of science, how to practically evaluate scientific findings with life-and-death consequences. Showing how to uncover scores of scientific flaws - typically used by special interests who try to justify their pollution - this book aims to liberate many potential victims of environmentall…
Human Rights: The Hard Questions
The United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. A burgeoning human rights movement followed, yielding many treaties and new international institutions and shaping the constitutions and laws of many states. Yet human rights continue to be contested politically and legally and there is substantial philosophical and theoretical debate over their foundations and implications. In this volume, distinguishe…
Renewable Technologies and Environmental Injustice: Subsidizing Bioenergy, Promoting Inequity
Dozens of developed countries massively subsidize biomass-crop growing/incineration, touting it as clean, renewable, and helping to alleviate climate change. Using a case study of a contemporary, state-of-the-art facility to incinerate Miscanthus-giganteus biomass, this article shows that bioenergy projects are (1) not clean, given overwhelming particulate and nitrogen-oxide releases; (2) disproportionately sited in EIJ situations, near communiti…
Nuclear Catastrophe, Disaster-Related Environmental Injustice, and Fukushima, Japan: Prima-Facie Evidence for a Japanese “Katrina”
Because Japan has few minorities, one might expect that its environmental-injustice (EI) threats are rare. This article suggests they are not rare. It also shows that prima-facie evidence for EI arises not only because of siting noxious or polluting facilities in poor or minority communities, but also because of racism and classism that cause disaster-related environmental injustice (DREI)—like that occurring after Hurricane Katrina. Using the 20…
University Environmental-Justice Whistleblowers Versus Industry Retaliators: Dow Chemical, Union Carbide, and Edward Calabrese
Although US law protects environmental-justice (EJ) whistleblowers from retaliation when they are federal-government, private-financial-sector, or private-environment-related-sector employees, university EJ scientists who blow the whistle on polluters have little federal protection if these polluters retaliate by charging them with research misconduct (RM). For instance, the lead industry retaliated against University of Pittsburgh physician Herb…
Sandra D. Mitchell Unsimple Truths: Science, Complexity, and Policy
Analyzing Public Participation in Risk Analysis: How the Wolves of Environmental Injustice Hide in the Sheep's Clothing of Science
In 1996 the U.S. National Academy of Sciences published a landmark volume, Understanding Risk, that mandated full public participation in environmental risk assessment, characterization, and management—particularly in environmental-justice (EJ) cases. It argued that because all types of risk decisions are laden with value judgments, experts alone ought not have control over them, and stakeholders should be part of the entire risk-decision process…
The Environment versus the Poor: Personal Reflections on Earth Day 1970
Conceptual analysis and special-interest science: Toxicology and the case of Edward Calabrese
Philosophy and Risk Assessment
Environmental Injustice in Siting Nuclear Plants
The mining, fuel enrichment-fabrication, and waste-management stages of the US commercial nuclear-fuel cycle have been documented as involving environmental injustices affecting, respectively, indigenous uranium miners, nuclear workers, and minorities and poor people living near radioactive-waste storage facilities. After surveying these three environmental-injustice problems, the article asks whether US nuclear-reactor siting also involves envir…
Evidentiary Standards and Animal Data
Those who wish to deny some instance of environmental injustice often attempt to place inappropriate evidentiary burdens on scientists who show disproportionate pollution effects on vulnerable populations. One such evidentiary standard is the epidemiological-evidence rule (EER). According to EER, legitimate causal inferences about pollution-related harm (and actions to reduce probable environmental injustice) require human-epidemiological data, n…
Nanotoxicology and Ethical Conditions for Informed Consent
Human Rights and Duties to Alleviate Environmental Injustice: The Domestic Case
To the degree that citizens have participated in, or derived benefits from, social institutions that have helped cause serious, life-threatening, or rights-threatening environmental injustice (EIJ), this article argues that they have duties either to stop their participation in these institutions or to compensate for it by helping to reform them. (EIJ occurs whenever children, poor people, minorities, or other subgroups bear disproportionate burd…
Trimming Exposure Data, Putting Radiation Workers at Risk: Improving Disclosure and Consent Through a National Radiation Dose-Registry
In the United States, regulatory standards allow workers to be exposed to ionizing radiation that can cause 1 additional cancer fatality per 400 workers per year. Because radiation-dose limits cover only single sources (e.g., a nuclear plant) or exposure classes (workplace, medical, or public) and are defined for average occupational exposure, workers typically do not know their precise cumulative, individual, and relative risks from radiation. N…
Comparativist Philosophy of Science and Population Viability Assessment in Biology: Helping Resolve Scientific Controversy
Comparing alternative scientific theories obviously is relevant to theory assessment, but are comparativists (like Laudan) correct when they also make it necessary ? This paper argues that they are not. Defining rationality solely in terms of theories’ comparative problem-solving strengths, comparativist philosophers of science like Laudan subscribe to what I call the irrelevance claim (IC) and the necessity claim (NC). According to IC, a scienti…
Flawed attacks on contemporary human rights: Laudan, Sunstein, and the cost-benefit state
Using Metascience to Improve Dose-Response Curves in Biology: Better Policy through Better Science
Many people argue that uncertain science—or controversial policies based on science—can be clarified primarily by greater attention to social/political values influencing the science and by greater attention to the vested interests involved. This paper argues that while such clarification is necessary, it is not a sufficient condition for achieving better science and policy; indeed its importance may be overemphasized. Using a case study involvin…
Risky Business Nuclear Workers, Ethics, and the Market-Efficiency Argument
Workers generally face higher levels of pollution and risk in their workplace than members of the public. Economists justify the double standard (for workplace versus public exposures to various pollutants) on the grounds of the compensating wage differential (CWD). The CWD, or hazard-pay premium, is the increment in wages, all things being equal, that workers in hazardous environments receive, as compared to other workers. Economists defend the …
Environmental justice: Creating Equality, Reclaiming Democracy
Atomism in Crisis: An Analysis of the Current High Energy Paradigm
Since the appearance of T. S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , scholars from various fields have sought to evaluate their disciplines in the light of Kuhnian criteria for scientific change. In this paper I argue that a new paradigm seems needed in high energy physics, and that there is no more reason to say that matter is made of elementary particles, than to say that it is not. My argument, that high energy physics is approaching…
Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity
(1993). Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Economic Geography: Vol. 69, Theme Issue: Environment and Development, Part 2, pp. 432-436
Nanotoxicology and Ethical Conditions for Informed Consent
Ethical Dilemmas and Radioactive Waste: A Survey of the Issues
Locke and Limits on Land Ownership
Revisionist history often upsets our ordinary ideas of right and wrong. We once believed, for example, that the Europeans who discovered and settled the new world were courageous in bringing civilization and its benefits to a new continent. It is now more common to recognize that some, perhaps many, of these explorers and settlers were tyrants who stole land from native Americans and often violently destroyed indigenous cultures. Just as scholars…
Conceptual analysis and special-interest science: Toxicology and the case of Edward Calabrese
Applied Ecology and the Logic of Case Studies
Because of the problems associated with ecological concepts, generalizations, and proposed general theories, applied ecology may require a new “logic” of explanation characterized neither by the traditional accounts of confirmation nor by the logic of discovery. Building on the works of Grünbaum, Kuhn, and Wittgenstein, we use detailed descriptions from research on conserving the Northern Spotted Owl, a case typical of problem solving in applied …
Environmental justice: A louisiana case study
Producer Risk, Consumer Risk, and Assessing Technological Impacts
High-energy models and the ontological status of the quark
Human Rights and Duties to Alleviate Environmental Injustice: The Domestic Case
To the degree that citizens have participated in, or derived benefits from, social institutions that have helped cause serious, life-threatening, or rights-threatening environmental injustice (EIJ), this article argues that they have duties either to stop their participation in these institutions or to compensate for it by helping to reform them. (EIJ occurs whenever children, poor people, minorities, or other subgroups bear disproportionate burd…
Comparativist Philosophy of Science and Population Viability Assessment in Biology: Helping Resolve Scientific Controversy
Comparing alternative scientific theories obviously is relevant to theory assessment, but are comparativists (like Laudan) correct when they also make it necessary ? This paper argues that they are not. Defining rationality solely in terms of theories’ comparative problem-solving strengths, comparativist philosophers of science like Laudan subscribe to what I call the irrelevance claim (IC) and the necessity claim (NC). According to IC, a scienti…
Using Metascience to Improve Dose-Response Curves in Biology: Better Policy through Better Science
Many people argue that uncertain science—or controversial policies based on science—can be clarified primarily by greater attention to social/political values influencing the science and by greater attention to the vested interests involved. This paper argues that while such clarification is necessary, it is not a sufficient condition for achieving better science and policy; indeed its importance may be overemphasized. Using a case study involvin…
First Things First: Balancing Scientific and Ethical Values in Environmental Science
T he U.S. Office of Technology Assessment has warned that up to ninety percent of all cancers are induced and theoretically preventable (see Lashof et al. 1981:3, 6ff.) A recent committee of the U.S. National Research Council opined that, after the year 2000, cancers would exceed strokes, heart attacks, and other ailments and thus become the leading cause of death of Americans (National Research Council 1996:335). Whether in the form of carcinoge…
Hydrogeology and Framing Questions Having Policy Consequences
Assessing the hydrogeological modeling at the Yucca Mountain and Maxey Flats nuclear repositories reveals a number of important ways in which theory choice can go wrong. The two cases suggest that there are at least six important criteria for evaluating the suitability of scientific models to be used for predictions intended to serve public policy. More generally, the paper argues that applied philosophy of science, as practiced in environmental …
Equity and nuclear waste disposal
Idealized laws, antirealism, and applied science: A case in hydrogeology
Agriculture, Property, and procedural justice
Environmental Impact Assessment and the Fallacy of Unfinished Business
Nearly all current attempts at environmental impact analysis and technology assessment fall victim to an ethical and methodological assumption that Keniston termed “the fallacy of unfinished business.” Related to one version of the naturalistic fallacy, this assumption is that technological and environmental problems have only technical, but not social, ethical, or political solutions. After using several impact analyses to illustrate the policy …
Quark quantum numbers and the problem of microphysical observation
Technology Assessment as Applied Philosophy of Science
Atomism in Crisis: An Analysis of the Current High Energy Paradigm
Since the appearance of T. S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , scholars from various fields have sought to evaluate their disciplines in the light of Kuhnian criteria for scientific change. In this paper I argue that a new paradigm seems needed in high energy physics, and that there is no more reason to say that matter is made of elementary particles, than to say that it is not. My argument, that high energy physics is approaching…
High-energy models and the ontological status of the quark
Ecological Justice and Low‐Level Radiation: Public Policy and Nuclear Technology
Technology Assessment as Applied Philosophy of Science
Environmental Impact Assessment and the Fallacy of Unfinished Business
Nearly all current attempts at environmental impact analysis and technology assessment fall victim to an ethical and methodological assumption that Keniston termed “the fallacy of unfinished business.” Related to one version of the naturalistic fallacy, this assumption is that technological and environmental problems have only technical, but not social, ethical, or political solutions. After using several impact analyses to illustrate the policy …
Unpopular Essays on Technological Progress
Quark quantum numbers and the problem of microphysical observation
Consensus and the visual acuity of quark hunters ? A response
The Atom Besieged: Extraparliamentary Dissent in France and Germany
Science Policy, Ethics, and Economic Methodology: Some Problems of Technology Assessment and Environmental-Impact Analysis
Agriculture, Property, and procedural justice
The real risks of risk-cost-benefit analysis
The Conceptual Risks of Risk Assessment
Many, if not most, risk assessors allege that their methods of risk identification and risk estimation are wholly objective. Contrary to this view, it can be shown that a variety of value judgments are inherent in classical risk assessment methods. In addition to these methodological threats to objectivity, there are at least three ethical problems which require risk assessors or policymakers to make normative decisions. After outlining these eth…
Science Policy, Ethics and Economic Methodology
Ethics in Policy Analysis
A Theory of Technology: Continuity and Change in Human Development by Thomas R. De Gregori (review)
THE REVIEW OF A THEORY OF TECHNOLOGY To the Editor: Being a reviewer of more than 100 scholarly books, including many in Technology and Culture—and the author of several books myself—it has always been my policy to accept any review, good or bad, of my books. Fortunately, most have been good. It is a well-founded and widely shared belief that it is better to receive bad reviews than not to be reviewed at all. However, when a review of my A Theory…
A Theory of Technology: Continuity and Change in Human Development
Producer Risk, Consumer Risk, and Assessing Technological Impacts
"The Review of "A Theory of Technology
Idealized laws, antirealism, and applied science: A case in hydrogeology
Risk and Rationality: Philosophical Foundations for Populist Reforms
Only ten to twelve percent of Americans would voluntarily live within a mile of a nuclear plant or hazardous waste facility. But industry spokespersons claim that such risk aversion represents ignorance and paranoia, and they lament that citizen protests have delayed valuable projects and increased their costs. Who is right? In Risk and Rationality, Kristin Shrader-Frechette argues that neither charges of irresponsible endangerment nor countercha…
Ethical Dilemmas and Radioactive Waste: A Survey of the Issues
Science, democracy, and public policy
Experts often tout highly subjective methods of policy analysis as scientific and value‐free. In The Myth of Scientific Public Policy, Robert Formaini exposes the uncertainties in two of these methods, cost‐benefit analysis and risk assessment. Because of these deficiencies, he concludes that ethics and political philosophy, not science, are the proper foundation for public policy. While Formaini is right to emphasize the value‐ladenness of cost‐…
Burying Uncertainty: Risk and the Case Against Geological Disposal of Nuclear Waste
Shrader-Frechette looks at current U.S. government policy regarding the nation's high-level radioactive waste both scientifically and ethically. What should be done with our nation's high-level radioactive waste, which will remain hazardous for thousands of years? This is one of the most pressing problems faced by the nuclear power industry, and current U.S. government policy is to bury "radwastes" in specially designed deep repositories. K. S. S…
Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity
(1993). Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Economic Geography: Vol. 69, Theme Issue: Environment and Development, Part 2, pp. 432-436
Philosophy (37 works) · Political science (34 works) · Epistemology (28 works) · Law (26 works) · Sociology (26 works) · Risk Perception and Management (21 works) · Environmental ethics (20 works) · Computer Science (17 works) · Engineering (15 works) · Environmental Justice and Health Disparities (15 works)