In other countries, quite different norms apply to the validity of causal proofs. Often, of course, they have only been established through social conflicts. In view of the globally intermeshed risks of modernization, the judges in Japan have decided they will If people could agree to the not totally absurd premise of not poisoning at all, then there would not be any problems. There would also be no more need for a maximum concentration decree. The problems therefore lie in the concessional character, in the double moral standard, in the yes-and-no of a maximum concentration decree. Here one is no longer concerned with questions of ethics at all but with how far one of most minimal rules of social life – not to poison each other – may be violated. It ultimately comes down to how long poisoning will not be called poisoning and when it will begin to be called poisoning. This is doubtless an important question, a much too important question to be left completely to experts on toxins. Life on Earth depends on it, and not only in the figurative sense. Once one has stepped onto the slippery slope of a ‘permissible toxic effect’, the question of how much toxicity is ‘permissible’ gains the importance that the young Hamlet – with a bit of pathos – reduced to the alternative: ‘to be or not to be?’ This is concealed in the maximum concentration decree – a peculiar document of this era. That will not be discussed here. We wish to move onto the ground of the acceptable value determination itself and inquire into its logic or non-logic, that is to say, we will ask whether it could possibly know what it purports to know.
If one permits toxicity at all, then one needs an acceptable level decree. But then that which is not contained in it becomes more important than what is in it. Because what is not in, not covered by it, is not considered toxic, and can freely be introduced into circulation, without any restraints. The silence of the acceptable level decree, its ‘blank spots’, are its most dangerous statements. What it does not discuss is what threatens us the most. With the maximum level decree, the definition of pesticides and of what is excluded from its scope as ‘non-pesticide toxins’ become the first switch thrown on the track to a long-term and permanent toxification of nature and humankind. The battle over definitions, no matter how much it seems to be conducted just within academia, thus has a more or less consequence for everyone.