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SCIENCE AND ITS LIMITS: THE REGULATOR'S DILEMMA 22 original typesetting files. Page breaks are true to the original; line lengths, word breaks, heading styles, and other typesetting-specific formatting, however, cannot be About this PDF file: This new digital representation of the original work has been recomposed from XML files created from the original paper book, not from the retained, and some typographic errors may have been accidentally inserted. Please use the print version of this publication as the authoritative version for attribution. ble, and perhaps would be revised every 10 years or so. One not entirely fanciful suggestion might be to set any probability of the order of 10-7 to 10-8 per year to be a de minimis cutoff, this being the frequency at which the earth may have been visited by the cometary asteroids that may have caused the geologic extinctions. CONCLUSIONS The reader must be aware that, as in most such questions, identifying and characterizing the problem is easier than solving it. That the regulator's and the toxic torts dilemma is rooted in science's inability to predict rare events cannot be denied. How to get the regulator and the toxic tort judge off the horns of the dilemma is far from easy, and my two suggestions are offered tentatively and with diffidence. Equally obvious is the intrinsic social dimension of the issue. In an open, litigious democracy such as ours, any regulation, any judicial decision can be appealed and if the courts offer no redress, in principle Congress can; but these mechanisms are ponderous. The result seems to me to be a gradual slowing of our technological-social engine as it becomes more and more enmeshed in fruitless argument over irresolvable questions. Western society was debilitated once before by such fruitless tilting with windmills. That was, of course, the devastating campaign against witches of the fourteenth to the early seventeenth centuries. As William Clark (1981) has put it so vividly, in this period society took for granted that death, disease, and crop failure could be caused by witches. To avoid such catastrophes one had to burn the witches responsibleâand some million innocent witches were burned as a result. Finally in 1610, the Spanish inquisitor Alonzo Salazar y Frias realized there was no demonstrated connection between catastrophe and witches. Though he did not prohibit their burning, he did prohibit use of torture to extract confessions. The burning of witches, and witch-hunting generally, declined precipitously. This story seems to capture the essence of our dilemma: the connection between low-level insult and bodily harm is probably as difficult to prove as is the connection between witches and failed crops. That our society nevertheless has allowed this issue to emerge as a serious social concern is an aberration, which in the modern context is hardly less fatuous than were the witch hunts of the Middle Ages. That dark phase in Western society died out only after several centuries. Let us hope our open, democratic society can regain its sense of proportion far sooner and can get on with managing the many real problems before us instead of wasting our energies on essentially insoluble, and by comparison, intrinsically unimportant, problems.
