One can argue quit similarly for the synergism of individual toxic substances. How does it help me to know that this or that toxin in this or that concentration is harmful, it I do not know what reactions the synergy of these of these multiple toxins provokes? It is already known from the field of internal medicine that medications can minimize or multiply each other’s effects. It is not completely misguided to surmise the same for the innumerable partial toxic effects permitted through acceptable levels. The decree does not contain an answer to this central question either.
Both of the logical flaws here are not coincidental, but rather are based on problems which systematically result when one moves onto the cockeyed plane of possible partial toxic effects. For it seems scornful if not cynical, to determine acceptable levels on the one hand and thus to permit toxic effects to some degree, and on the other to devote no intellectual effort whatsoever to the question of what effects the summation of toxins have in their synergy. This reminds one of the story about a gang of poisoners who stand before their victim and assure the judge with an innocent look that each of them was well under the acceptable levels and thus should be acquitted!
Now many will say, those are fine demands, but that is not possible, and for fundamental reasons. We have only a specialized knowledge of individual pollutants. Even that is dragging miserably far behind the industrial multiplication of chemical compounds and materials. We have a lack of personnel, research experts, and so on. But do people know what they are saying here? The proffered knowledge on acceptable levels does not become one jot better because of that. It remains eye-wash to set acceptable levels for individual pollutants, if at the same time one releases thousands of other harmful materials, whose synergistic effects one says nothing about!
If this is really not possible any other way, then that means nothing less than that the system of professional overspecialization and its official organization fails in the face of the risks set in motion by industrial development. It may be suited to the development of productivity, but not to the limitation of dangers. Of necessity, people are threatened in their civilizational risk positions not by individual pollutants, but holistically. To respond to their forced questions regarding their holistic endangerment with tables of acceptable values for individual substances amounts to collective ridicule with consequences that are no longer only latently murderous. It may be that one could make this mistake in times of a general belief in progress. But to stick to it today in the face of widespread protests and statistical evidence of morbidity and mortality, under the legitimating protection of scientific ‘acceptable value rationality’, far exceeds the dimensions of a crisis of faith, and is enough to call for the public prosecutor.
But let us put these considerations aside for a moment. Let us take a look at the scientific construction of an acceptable level. In a purely