Research On The Application Of Spiritual Compensation In Environmental Tort Dispute

Since the reform and opening up,China has made a great success in the process of industrial modernization,and our economy has got a rapid development.However,The increased frequency of environmental pollution has become an unignorable problem.The environmental torts not only severely infringe citizens' body rights and property rights,but also damage spiritual interests.Nevertheless the recognition rate of moral damage compensation caused by environmental tort is very low in judicial adjudication.The main reason is that environmental tort is a special type of tort,it demonstrates special characteristic,so they can not directly apply the system of moral damage compensation.The difference of them mainly reflects in the doctrine of liability fixation,the scope of application and the compensation amount.There are positive meanings if they can solve the environmental tort compensation for moral damage.They could not only enhance the protection of citizen's spiritual interests,establish the authority of law,but also prevent and educate polluters to try to avoid pollute environmental.Then they can realize the principle of fairness and justice in the environment tort,and reduce the probability of the social conflicts occurrence,and protect the sustainable development of ecological environment.First of all,the spiritual damage is an invisible and internal damage.The functions of mental damage include comforting victims and punish infringers.If the infringer infringe others with unintentional or non-material fault,it will be unreasonable to punish the infringers and to make the infringers shoulder the responsibility of comforting the victims.Therefore,in educational circles,the mainstream view is that they should apply the fault liability principle to decide whether victims may claim mental damage compensation.But in the environment tort,the status between victims and polluters is unequal.It is always hard for victims to prove the fault of infringers,so environment pollution liability applies no fault liability.If they apply the fault liability principle to decide polluter's environment pollution liability,in the meantime,apply no fault liability principle to decide polluter's mental damage liability,it will cause judicial confusion.Furthermore,the main function of mental compensation is comforting victims and compensating the mental damage.When polluters cause victims' mental damage,they cannot let victims bear their mental damage just due to the infringer's behavior is usually a kind of production and operating activities and these activities can promote the development of social economy.It is obviously injustice.Therefore,they need to discuss the way of solving this problem from the legal interpretative theory and the legislative theory.Secondly,in the environmental tort disputes,victims' main damages are environmental interests and mental interests.The existing mental damage compensation provisions can well reply to citizen's body damage,but they are not good at replying mental damage in the environmental tort disputes,especially not good at replying the pure spirit damage.Some scholars have proposed that they may consider the pure spirit damage as a kind of mental health damage so as to apply the existing mental damage compensation provisions to compensate the pure spirit damage,expanding the connotation of health right.However,the health right refers to the normal operations of citizen' physiological function.It is a kind of substantial rights of personality and it can not contain mental health which is aim at protecting citizen' awareness.In addition,scholars and judges take restrictive attitude of other personality interests.There are many strict requirements when identify the scope of other personality interests,so it is difficult to put environmental interests into the scope of other personality interests.In judicial practice,sometimes they use neighboring relations provisions to compensate mental damages that caused by environmental tort.But neighboring relations provisions can only be applied in the case of utilizing neighboring real estate.So neighboring relations provisions can not completely solve the problem of mental damage compensation in environmental tort disputes.On this basis,they need to enlarge the scope of mental damage compensation provisions.By adding environmental interests and pure spirit interests to the scope of mental damage compensation,they can protect citizen's mental interests.Finally,the amount of mental damage compensation is the purpose of discuss doctrine of liability fixation and applicable scope.It directly refers to the protection of victim's right.At the moment,the amount of mental damage compensation that decides by the judge is usually too low,so they can not achieve the purposes of comforting victims and punishing polluters.In addition,the existing mental damage compensation provisions have not stipulated the standard of calculates the amount of mental damage compensation and have not studied any typed torts.Relying on the discretion of judges to decide the amount of mental damage compensation will lead to the arbitrariness of calculation.The environmental tort is a special kind of torts.It is all these special characteristics that decide the difference of its evaluating factors.In environmental tort,they should build a more suitable evaluating way for calculating the amount of compensation,in order to better guide the judicial practice and strengthen the protection of victim's mental interests.