Question

Research a contemporary moral dilemma within a news area. Apply moral thinking to your case study using any of the key concepts studied in this Unit. In particular, apply the formula intent/means/circumstances. (You could think or immigration policy, an armed conflict with North Korea, or a host of other issues.)

Answer 1

Ethical reasoning represents an age old philosophical field Where scholars and philosophers have attempted to formulate a definite and practice paradigm for evaluating the rightness or wrongness of human actions. From the Stoics in Ancient Greek civilisation to the British utilitarians in the 19-20th century, moral judgement has been uniformly defined as  judgment of the rightness or wrongness of acts that are intended to cause harm to people other than the agent. Thus moral judgments depend on interests of other people and they focus on harms as opposed to pleasure.

From this standpoint, the traditional philosophical doctrines of Consequentialism, prescribe that moral reasoning and decisions should be based on consequences, action and intention.These three factors are associated with moral judgments in a way that Moral scenarios that involve only a choice between actions with different consequences ranging on a gradient of different amounts of harm elicited, lead to an emotional dissonance or imbalance and create an urgent need within the individual for establishing the best morally correct reason in that situation.

I would like to delve further into this issue using the example of the recent media coverage of the poor work conditions for outsourced labour in the international industries and textile labels such as ZARA. The merchandise organisation ZARA came under immense attack and scrutiny for its exploitative treatment of its factory employees in Vietnam as cheap labour. Besides, inequality in the pay scale, the workers also complained of poor working conditions such as no breaks for defecating or getting refreshments and food. The projection of the work ethics of these international brands in the news media did not merely create a sensationalising function. Rather, it also created a process of critical review of the growing consumerist ideology of the globalised societies. It allowed an opportunity to the consumers and buyers of these goods in the developed countries to reconsider their own involvement in the perpetuation of economic inequality and create a moral dilemma whether to buy or not to buy such unethically produced goods.

Questions such as what is its supply chain? What kind of people made the products we own, and how much were they paid? How about the conditions under which they worked? In a globalised world where supply chains are scattered across the world, it’s almost impossible to know the stories behind the assembly of all the items in your wardrobe and office. And yet, it is easy to get what one wants for a cheaper price.

The moral thinking that is triggered in such news bulletins is whether awareness of these facts leads the consumers to think: is it wrong to buy a product whose production probably depends on harsh conditions further up the supply chain? Or should one boycott products until the organisation claims responsibility for redressal Or should we keep buying? As boycotting a product may just put workers out of a job. How do we find the middle ground to this urban global problem? It asks for evolving a moral reasoning and action based on assessment of the consequences of the actions manufacturers as well as the consumers and their level of involvement in perpetuating intentional harm to the victims.

While creating awareness may be seen as the first step, news media in itself is not seen to claim responsibility for guiding the consumers’ moral decision making in such issues.