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Sunday, April 20, 2014

Ethical aspects of radiological protection


Virtue ethics

 

It is well known that early applications of radiation resulted in severe injuries to the exposed personnel. Examples are: Use of X-rays and use of radium compounds for painting the watch dials. Such effects are now known as deterministic effects of radiation exposure. For radiological protection, under such situations, the control was to reduce the dose levels to the individuals to prevent such deterministic effects. Virtue ethics is concerned with the actions for complete well-being of a person, and a person-based decision to act and provide guidance to prevent severe health effects in all such radiation exposure situations.  

 

Utilitarian approach to ethics

 

In this approach, the consequences of a given radiation exposure is assessed. Action which produces the maximum benefits over harms for everyone affected or exposed is accepted as the morally right course of action. All the available options and the general balance of short-term and long-term benefit over the harm to all persons are considered. This is the justification process based on cost-benefit analysis. Dose limits, based on stochastic considerations provide the upper-bounds for optimization.

 

Duty-based or Deontological ethics


Duty-based (Deontological) ethics are concerned with what people do and not with the consequences of their actions. People have a duty to do the right thing or take right decision even if it produces consequences which may not be acceptable to all.  The Duty-based ethical systems expects due regard to be given to even to small group of persons even if the actions are at odds with the interests of a larger group. Dose constraints/risk constraints are considered for optimization of protection.

The current recommendations of the ICRP emphasize more duty-based ethics, giving more importance to the control of individual doses than to the collective dose and cost-benefit analysis. Exposure to individuals is controlled by the use of dose/risk constraints on multiple sources of exposure.   

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