Walmart Ethics

...

Ethical issues in the UK regard selling alcohol cheaply in a form that is appealable to the younger audience. As a part of their criticism to cheap alcohol which was said to be made especially to appeal to under age people ASDA stopped selling “shooter” that had alcohol over 15% and used packaging and cheap pricing techniques that appealed to younger underage drinkers in order to prevent this from happening. Due to statistics saying that underage drinking has increased ASDA also introduced the Challenge 25 which means that if the buyer of alcohol looks under 25 years old then the worker must ask for poof of identification that they are over 18 years of age. It can be seen that a consequentialist approach towards these business ethics dilemma was taken because the morality was judged through its result, this then ended in taken action in order to be ethically correct, as the example before after the effect of bad working condition etc the retailer had signed up voluntarily in order to change and be more ethical and achieve “the greatest happiness for the greatest number”. This is known as utilitarianism which was started by an English philosopher Jeremy Bentham. So we can see that this was an attempt by the company ASDA in order to make “everyone” happy as not only the workers in Bangladesh were unhappy but it was not convenient for customers here in the UK to know where their products are from and how unethically they are produced. This utilitarianism theory outlines the way of dealing with an ethical dilemma is quite practical as it calculates effects of action, it is coherent, it considers majority interest therefore its democratic, and it is prospective due to comparing alternatives. However there are slight issues with this method because how can you measure happiness?

This theory also is concerned with the majority, what about the minority? It can almost be bad because it states that “the greatest happiness for the greatest number” so in theory if we have a third of the world being working like this example in Bangladesh in bad working conditions, being exploited resulting in the other two thirds of the world having cheap items, as long as the other two thirds are happy it is ethical to proceed. This would contradict with the deontological theory set out by the German Philosopher Immanuel Kant, his theory is more principle orientated and concerned with treating humanity as a means and an end which is by being fairly and not exploiting. John Locke an English Philosopher progresses to “do not do to others if it would cause pain to you” it is about a good conduct of love and pace. Evaluating the decision made by the company it is clear that a consequentialist decision was made in relation to being an ethical decision, the decision was made as a result therefore it is result orientated, ideally a deontological approach should be taken where you treat others as you would like to be treated as the saying is said but a lot of people wouldn’t agree as its less profitable but it would have prevented the bad press which I am sure it would have also had an impact on the company being less profitable.