Environmental health research produces scientific knowledge about environmental hazards crucial for public health and environmental justice movements that seek to prevent or reduce exposure to these hazards. The environment in environmental health research is conceptualized as the range of possible social, biological, chemical, and/or physical hazards or risks to human health, some of which merit study due to factors such as their probability and severity, the feasibility of their remediation, and injustice in their distribution. This paper explores the ethics of identifying the relevant environment for environmental health research, as judgments involved in defining an environmental hazard or risk, judgments of that hazard or risk's probability, severity, and/or injustice, as well as the feasibility of its remediation, all ought to appeal to non-epistemic as well as epistemic values. I illustrate by discussing the case of environmental lead, a housing-related hazard that remains unjustly distributed by race and class and is particularly dangerous to children. Examining a controversy in environmental health research ethics where researchers tested multiple levels of lead abatement in lead-contaminated households, I argue that the broader perspective on the ethics of environmental health research provided in the first part of this paper may have helped prevent this controversy.

环境健康研究产生有关环境危害的科学知识，这对于寻求预防或减少暴露于这些危害的公共卫生和环境正义运动至关重要。环境健康研究中的环境被概念化为可能对人类健康造成的社会、生物、化学和/或物理危害或风险的范围，其中一些由于其概率和严重性、补救的可行性等因素而值得研究，以及分配不公。本文探讨了为环境健康研究确定相关环境的伦理学，作为定义环境危害或风险所涉及的判断，对该危害或风险的概率、严重性和/或不公正性的判断，以及其补救的可行性，一切都应该诉诸非认知价值和认知价值。我通过讨论环境铅的案例来说明，这是一种与住房相关的危害，仍然不公平地按种族和阶级分配，对儿童尤其危险。检查环境健康研究伦理方面的争议，研究人员在铅污染家庭中测试了多层次的铅减排，我认为本文第一部分提供的环境健康研究伦理的更广泛视角可能有助于防止这一争议。