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Practical Moral Philosophy for Lawyers A Small Businessman Your client owns a vineyard and makes wine. The wines do not travel well and have a short bottle life. The client has expanded his sales to out-of-state markets and has "prepared" the wines by adding a chemical preservative. Tests of the preservative by the Food and Drug Administration have determined that in sufficient quantities, the preservative causes cancer of the liver in rats. The FDA has authority to ban such substances from use in food products (assume that beer, wine, and liquor are food products within the meaning of the statute) whenever scientific tests using animal subjects result in such findings as in the present case. (The FDA laws involved here have previously been used to ban the use of cyclamates from soft drinks.) The client has just finished "putting down" the summer picking of grapes and has treated approximately one half of the current production with the suspected cancerous chemical preservative. The client, with the support of other small vineyard operators, seeks to delay the FDA ban on the chemical. Your client, and other vineyard operators, claim they will be financially ruined if they cannot sell their current production wines. The FDA chemical preservative studies have been conducted by reputable scientists at UCLA and Harvard. The American Academy of Science, the most prestigious body of scientists in the world, has for many years supported regulatory bans on the use of chemicals found to cause cancer in animals based on studies of the kind involved here. There is, however, a small contingent of scientists who maintain that cancer research using animals is not reliable in determining the long-term effect of chemical substances in humans. As a lawyer, will you seek a delay in implementation of the FDA ban on the use of chemical preservatives in wine to permit your client to sell the present year's crop of grapes?
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