The title comes from a result in a survey commissioned by the department of agricultural economics at Oklahoma State. I’ve highlighted the response in the context of others. The issue here is that about the same proportion of the public also supports mandatory labelling of “genetically modified organisms” (GMO). This can be parsed in numerous ways. One common tack, even accepted by many scientists who reject the fear of GMO, is that the public has a right to know what is in its food as a matter of principle. But what if we put the proposition forward that the public has the right to know what quantity of DNA was in its food? I think perhaps many who make the argument that the public have the “right to know” might acknowledge that this is not an absolute right, and that there isn’t something in our “Natural Rights” that includes food labelling. The reality is that if the public has a right to know, we still have to delimit what it has the right to know (there are many facets and aspects of food production).
A major problem when addressing GMO is that many people deny that the GMO element as such is the issue at the heart of the debate. Rather, they suggest that the public has the “right to know.” Or, the problem is agribusiness. Or intellectual property. And so forth. But from what I have seen and heard much of this is an artful dodge when you corner people and smoke out the true concerns. The reality is that GMO makes people uncomfortable, and that discomfort is to a great extent not predicated on a rational basis. Therefore they appeal to other avenues of objection which can give their intuition a solid basis of argumentation. That’s fine as far as to goes, but let’s be clear and honest that the major elephant in the room is the “wisdom of repugnance.”
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