A few
years ago Harvard University launched an e-learning initiative in order to make
the knowledge of Harvard accessible to a global audience. The most successful
professor in this program has been philosophy professor Michael
Sandel. His lectures, freely
accessible over the Internet, have become enormously popular in Asia. He has appeared on
television in Japan numerous times, and at a lecture series at Tokyo University there were scalpers selling tickets to get in.
In his
lectures, Professor Sandel focuses on moral paradoxes, and he encourages
students to comment and on dilemmas that cannot be solved according to rigid
moral rules. For
example, you are the driver of a runaway trolley car heading down a track
toward a crew of five workers who are on the track. You can switch the trolley to
another track where there is only one worker. In another scenario, you are on a
bridge above the track watching helplessly as the train speeds toward the five
workers. Beside you is a very large man leaning over the railing. You could
push him over, making him land on the track and derail the trolley car. As
in the first scenario, this would sacrifice one life to save five. In another
scenario, a surgeon in an emergency room is faced with five patients who each
have different organs failing. In the next room is a healthy patient who came
in for a checkup. It occurs to the doctor that the healthy patient could be
sacrificed. Five of his organs could be used to save five lives.
As
Professor Sandel discusses these three scenarios, he lets students provide the
answers and keeps his own views to himself. However, as he guides the
discussion, it is obvious that he has led the audience to the realization that
moral decisions have to be suited to the
context rather than with strict adherence to rigid rules laid down before the
unique circumstance was encountered. In the first scenario, most people say
that the driver would be justified in choosing to kill one rather than five,
but in the other two almost no one favors sacrificing one life to save five.
The
curious thing about Professor Sandel’s work is that he is more famous in Asia
than in America. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times noted in an
article about Sandel “the hunger
of young people [in Asia] to engage in moral reasoning and debates.” This appetite may exist in the young because the
ruling generation has such a atrophied ability in these areas.
In one
show that aired recently on Japan’s NHK, Professor Sandel led a panel in a
discussion of the question of how the victims of the nuclear accident at
Fukushima Daiichi should be compensated. It turned out to be a rather shallow
discussion of the obvious issues. Professor Sandel, the celebrity panelists and
student participants from China, Japan and the USA were all able to hit on a few
obvious ideas of where the money could come from. Students from China felt that
the rich should voluntarily contribute to a fund. Others stated the obvious,
that TEPCO (the utility) should pay, but it was quickly apparent that doing so
would bankrupt the corporation several times over. So rates would have to
increase, but is this fair? Perhaps everyone will have to pay through higher taxes. This was
about as far as the discussion went.
No one
really thought outside the box and asked whether any individual was criminally
liable for action or inaction that led to the accident, or made it worse afterwards. No one discussed the
role of insurance companies, or the idea that all electrical utilities in Japan
could pool resources to compensate for accidents by a single utility. A
stronger central government could get the heads of Japan’s top twenty
corporations in one room and tell them there is going to be a one-time tax on
their cash reserves to cover the enormous cost of this national tragedy. Or
Japan could recognize that the disaster is too big for any single country to
deal with, and also recognize that the global nuclear industry bears some
responsibility. Japan, and the victims in a class action lawsuit, would be
justified in making compensation claims outside Japan – regardless of
whatever pre-existing deal there was to let General Electric off the hook for
liability. Andrew Horvat
researched the history of Japan’s
entry into nuclear energy, and he describes how scientists were
ignored while planners caved in to politics and trade pressure from the U.S. While
there were better options such as heavy water reactors designed in Canada (natural
rather than enriched uranium, low risk of meltdown), TEPCO went with the General Electric Mark 1 reactor, with its
enriched uranium and faulty venting and
containment systems that have been known about in the industry since the 1970s.
It is
disappointing to see that Professor Sandel couldn’t have led the discussion toward these more provocative views. Here’s
another moral dilemma for
Professor Sandel to offer to the Japanese for discussion:
A major
nuclear accident has just dumped a tremendous amount of nuclear fallout on
2,000 square kilometers of farmland, forest and urban areas (total size of
Fukushima Prefecture: 13,000 square kilometers). The size of the area might be much larger, and the
extent of the damage and the health effects will take a long time to determine
with certainty. Scientific experts have wide disagreements about how dangerous
the situation is. Estimates range from the most optimistic, which say countermeasures
will cause more harm than the radiation, to the most pessimistic, which say
that there will great human suffering and large health costs. There could be birth defects,
immune diseases, developmental disorders, widespread increased morbidity
(obesity, allergies, diabetes, hormonal disorders) and higher rates of cancer.
Contamination in the food and water supply could spread the catastrophe to a
much wider area.
If you
are the government, you have to decide if it is better to save lives or to save livelihoods. Should you neglect the
people in order to save the economy? It seems to be similar to the paradox of a
counter-insurgency in which an army has to destroy a village in order to save
it.
If the government chooses the precautionary principle this requires the admission that
the whole region has to be abandoned. Evacuate everyone and get farmers to stop
growing food for the market.
Face the reality of the situation, and pay a big cost now in order to avoid the
possibility of an enormous public health tragedy in the future.
An
examination of government actions since March 2011 shows which way this
question has been decided, and it also shows why the Japanese nation is in such
desperate need of help from foreign experts in moral philosophy.
Since
the nuclear catastrophe, government efforts have leaned heavily on throwing a
lifeline to farmers and other economic interests in Fukushima prefecture. Professor Yukio
Hayakawa is one of the few to renounce the notion that farmers are
the victims that need to be supported by being allowed to sell contaminated
food. School children
have been fed local products in school lunches, often against their parents’ wishes,
and food from
Fukushima has been sold nationwide. It is true that much of the produce is not contaminated, but the government failed so badly in setting up an effective screening system that now the public rightfully mistrusts anything with the Fukushima label on it. The public also rightly suspects that because farmers were allowed to grow food, even when it is condemned at harvest it still exists. It is likely to flow into a black market of falsely labelled products. Food labeling scandals are a familiar part of the corrupt distribution system in Japan.
The
government is also preparing
to spend billions of dollars on decontamination and rehabilitation efforts that
will most likely prove to be futile. Recently, people have found that areas that had been
decontaminated are now recontaminated with fallout carried by the wind off
of forested slopes. Cedar pollen next spring is expected to bring more. And
huge amounts of spent nuclear fuel and melted cores are going to be unsecured
for years to come. The situation has not been brought under control, no matter
how the government decides to define “cold shutdown” in this case.
No
relocation funds have been offered to families who want to leave with their
children. The government is stuck in the same state of denial as the nuclear
plant operators in the first days of the meltdowns. Within
hours of losing backup power, it was obvious even to informed amateurs that full meltdowns
would occur and the
Daiichi site would never generate electricity again. Yet TEPCO management made
the situation worse by refraining from emergency measures that would damage the
reactors, even
though their underlings could tell them they were already a lost cause. They were still under the
delusion that the plant could be saved.
Seven
months after the disaster, the national and prefectural governments are stuck
in the same kind of denial about the destroyed regions of Fukushima. They still
believe the contaminated areas can be saved, and they are willing to put
citizens lives at risk to make this bet. Time may prove that everything I am
saying here is wrong. Perhaps young children really can withstand 20-100 mSv of
exposure annually, as well as high levels of internal radiation. Time
will tell. But who would take the chance with his own child? There is enough evidence from sixty years
of research on the question to
suggest that these levels are much too dangerous. Even if an evacuation order
proved in the future to have been unnecessary, one could never say that it was
a mistake. It would be the wisest and most cautious decision made at the time
with the information available. No shame. No regrets.
The
population of Fukushima Prefecture is only 1.7% of the Japanese population, and
there are some western parts of it are not contaminated. Compared to the
enormous costs of reconstruction and decontamination being contemplated now, it
would be cheaper and safer to close up every contaminated village and city
(including the capital, Fukushima City, which, with numerous Chernobyl-level
hot spots, is arguably uninhabitable for children and thus doomed to depopulation
even if adults stay).
If Japan can't handle this internal refugee
problem, it can turn to G8 allies like Canada that
already take in 250,000 immigrants and refugees annually. This is difficult to
contemplate for a
First World country like Japan,
but completely feasible from an economic perspective when one considers the
much larger cost of a hopeless attempt
to save these communities. Recently, the government lifted an evacuation order
on towns in the 20-30km zone around Fukushima Daiichi, but, as an article in The Economist reports,
no one wants to return. They are stating the truth that the government cannot
face up to. Even if it were safe to live in these places, the stigma and
uncertainty attached to them has condemned them to a rapid decline.
This can
be said not only of the small towns near the plant but of Fukushima City also. The residents
of this city, representing 0.3% of the population of Japan, could easily be
relocated. Let it be the world's second ghost
city after
Pripyat. Walk away from
it and leave the buildings standing, like the dome in Hiroshima, as a museum
and monument to the hazards of nuclear age – which
is, of course, precisely what the nuclear industry and its government backers do not want to
create. In the future
people may visit as
tourists, or come to shoot dystopian science fiction movies, and they may marvel that fellow citizens ever
contemplated letting the victims continue to live in their irradiated city. If
we thought we couldn't afford to evacuate a small city like Fukushima, what
would we do for Tokyo? These ruins could stand as a sobering reminder of what
would follow a meltdown near a large city, or the atomic bombing of a modern
metropolis. Remember that Fukushima was lucky – about 75% of the fallout went
southeast over the Pacific.
Unfortunately, the judgment of Japanese leadership has
failed. There is a
powerful psychological denial in the face of a national trauma. The Japanese government
is like an overly sentimental parent who can't consent
to an amputation to save a child's life. But sentiment is not the only factor.
In fact, the main influence on decisions may be cold-blooded calculation.
Bankers don't want to write off mortgages, the Finance Ministry doesn't want to
bail out bankers, and the bureaucracy is falling back on an old habit – turning
the compensation effort into an engineering task and economic stimulus package
of public works projects.
Thus it
is the presence of Professor Sandel on Japanese television that makes me think
that the cause of so many poor decisions is a truly diminished capacity for
moral reasoning among the citizens who have put their heads in the sand, and the governing elite who cannot
admit to the horrific costs of past mistakes nor
see the
best way forward.
People seriously believe, and are being told by their government, that citizens
of Osaka have a moral obligation to eat the food produced in Fukushima. Yes,
it’s complicated, the ruin of farmland is one of the saddest aspects of the
tragedy, but if you
think it's a tough moral decision, your moral faculties need a workout. A person with intact
moral capacity would quickly realize that the needs of the many take precedence
over the needs of the few. The farmers can be compensated or given land
elsewhere if there
is truly a will to help them. It is a shame
that the Japanese nation is not capable of imagining better solutions to this
crisis.
