American Food Safety Law And Ethics Joint Research (1906-1938)

In recent years, with the continuous development of China’s industrial economyand the urbanization, China has entered an important transition period during theprocess of economic and social modernization. And all kinds of social problems andcontradictions during the transition period also continue to highlight. Among them,the topic of social issues related to public social security and interests, such as foodsafety, gradually increases and becomes a hot livelihood issue of the communityconcern. The social problems’ nature is the problem of the social ethical value system.So food security becoming a hot social concern just reflects the problem that ourcurrent food safety laws and ethical constraint mechanism are difficult to mergetogether. For food safety issues, law should play the ultimate protection of right, butthe existing food safety laws and regulations system often looks powerless in ourcountry’s food safety area now. Check this powerlessness from the ethical point ofview of food safety laws, we can get some inspiration: legal attention and acceptanceof the ethical considerations, is an inner, important and can easily be overlookedfactor that related food safety law can protect citizen food security interests. A "safeand effective" food law must be a composite system that contains fluent ethicallogical links. The basic value of the food safety law is the public health and safetyinterest, and ethics is an important method to evaluate this value. Food safety issue isindeed a major social problem in China now. But food safety issue in not only existsin China, other countries like Britain, America all have the food safety issues in theirparticular historical period which is called social transition period. Food safety issuecomes with the social division, especially with the emergence of the food industry.For sure, capitalist industrial revolution didn’t happen together at different countries, but as a common issue during the process of urbanization, food safety issue getenough attention and all the countries take many methods to regulate it. All countrieshave their own coping strategies with different focus and features, and it also reflectsthe different social environment and institutional environment among differentcountries. One of the most important and common method is to regulate the foodsafety issue in the form of legislation and setup the appropriate government regulatorysystem.This paper select the U.S. Food Law1906-1938as the research object, for thefood law in this period of U.S. has a distinct character of the time and progress, toprovide a reference for improving contemporary Chinese food law. The completenessof the U.S. food legal system reflects in two ways. On one hand, the number of U.S.food safety regulatory law is large. Since the first named directly of the food safetylaw were formulated in1906, there are35federal food bills had been developed oramended, covering almost food production, consumption. On the other hand, U.S.food safety regulatory model and regulatory body is also distinctive. About20administrative departments of the united states and13states to share a total foodsafety regulatory powers, and coordination of responsibilities between thesedepartments, to form a comprehensive coverage of food safety regulatory authoritynetwork.Regarding to the American food safety law and ethics joint research, there is notdedicated, systematic study in domestic academia. According to current investigationsituation, the domestic study show the following characteristics:1. Research methodsfocus on topics cover、contrast study, mainly from the perspective of history andpolitics regulatory regimes.2. Research content is scattered and specific and relativelyfocus on some areas. In contrast, foreign research focuses on regulatory measurementand the balance of society interests, as well as the analysis of consumer protection andsocial factors etc. For example: American federal food legislation changes、the federalfood bill supervision、 the affection of consumers and other stakeholders inlegislation.This paper focuses on three fields related to food safety legal ethics, namely thegovernment supervision, food production enterprises and consumers and the publicinterest, divided into the following five chapters.The first chapter is the food safety legal and ethical theory. This chapter depicts the ethics, applied ethics, legal ethics and food law ethics layer by layer, explores thetheoretical foundation for the joint study of food laws and ethics. And then putforward: food law belongs to the social law, legal ethics belongs to applied ethicscategory in ethics, food law ethics is mainly related to the consumption ethics,business ethics and administrative ethics.The second chapter is the ethics of consumption and food law. This chapterreview the consumption ethics application before America federal legislation,compare the consumer rights protection clause in the “Pure Food and Drug Act” of1906with the corresponded terms in the “Food Drug and Cosmetic Act” of1938, thenpoint out the advancement and rationality of the consumer protection provisions in1938.The third chapter is the enterprise ethics and food law. In this chapter we studythe enterprise participation during the American food safety legislation process from1906to1938, then to analyze the business ethics setup in above two acts.The fourth chapter is administrative ethics and food law. This chapter focuseson the reasons of the federal unified states legislation during this period in USA,discourses the food supervision power and its application in different states, anddemonstrates the relations between state and federal legislation. In this chapter, wealso widely elaborate the federal government food regulatory power change and thelegal regulation specific content of food supervision right. In addition, this chapterexpatiates the jurisdictions of main food regulatory bodies (FDA, Ministry ofAgriculture etc).The fifth chapter analyzes the problems of food law with ethical coupling,indicates the social public interest is the fundamental drive of cooperation, and thefederal unified supervision is the concrete application of consumer and enterprisecooperation strategy. In addition, the federal legislation also reflects the regulatorybody needs to balance social interests.Through above analysis, we can draw two conclusions. The first one is, as asocial law, America food safety legal system better reflects the coupling of law andethics, namely the legal system progress and the strength of ethical coupling isproportional relationship. The second one is, each revision of America federallegislation in this period well reflects the interests balance among the regulation,consumer and enterprise, and take adaptive legislative strategy to make the foodlegislation consistent with America economic and social development goals. Inaddition, through the investigation of the history of American food safety supervision law in this period, we can take it as a reference for food safety issue of contemporaryChina, and give full consideration to all the factors, especially the influence of moraland ethical factors, before the legislation. How the food law really becomes a "live"law, largely depends on its acceptance of ethics.