Sustainable Design and Social Responsibility - Sustainable Design: The Science of Sustainability and Green Engineering - page 202

3. Nonmaleficence : affirmation of doing no harm or evil.
4. Justice : the fair and equal treatment of people.
Three of these moral principles were codified in the1979 release of The
Belmont Report: Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Sub-
jects of Research . * The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has
summarized the intent of the report:
The Belmont Report attempts to summarize the basic ethical principles
identified by the Commission in the course of its deliberations. It is the
outgrowth of an intensive four-day period of discussions that were held
in February 1976 at the Smithsonian Institution's Belmont Conference
Center supplemented by the monthly deliberations of the Commission
that were held over a period of nearly four years. It is a statement of
basic ethical principles and guidelines that should assist in resolving the
ethical problems that surround the conduct of research with human
subjects. By publishing the Report in the Federal Register, and providing
reprints upon request, the Secretary intends that it may be made readily
available to scientists, members of institutional review boards, and federal
employees.
The needed changes outlined in the Belmont Report resulted from the abuses
of Nazi science and, ultimately, the U.S. Public Health Service-sponsored
Tuskegee syphilis trials. These travesties led to consensus among the sci-
entific community for the need to regulate research more diligently and
to codify regulations to ensure that researchers abide by these princi-
ples. The other principle, nonmaleficence, follows ethical precepts re-
quired in many ethical frameworks, including harm principles, empa-
thy, and consideration of special populations, such as the infirmed and
children.
Thus, green medicine and green engineering, while having different
client perspectives, ultimately call for consideration of fairness and open-
ness in practice. Arguably, much of sustainable design and green medicine
is about justice. In fact, the environmental justice initiative has evolved along
the same time line as that of sustainable design. The two movements are
complementary.
* U. S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, National Commission for the Pro-
tection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, The Belmont Report:
Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research , April 18,
1979.