PART 1
In the very beginning, we should mention that the current social cataclysm is symbolized by a particular phenomenon mentioned as the “opioid crisis.” It is all about the first and the last company, Purdue Pharma. It is the company that is held responsible for numerous questionable and controversial promotional and manufacturing practices of OxyContin. This crisis, therefore, is two-sided, this being the omission of an ethic and choice of company owners who are short-sighted and whose businesses have a direct impact on the lives of humanity.
Purdue Pharma’s Immoral Actions: Purdue Pharma’s leadership went to the extent of a misleading advertising campaign so that the objective was achieved effortlessly – the fact that the drug could make users addicted was skipped past. According to Van Zee (2009), for both medical professionals and the public at large, the overuse of Oxycontin was not an issue to be worried about. That is the paradox. This damaging tactic was a direct cause of the worsening over time opioid abuse that has left an issue that is a price tag to the whole society.
Immoral Business Motivations/Structures: The experience of dealing with Purdue Pharma shows how it influences humanity if the programs lose the value of human beings. Through this example, the overall message becomes apparent in the pharmaceutical industry that not mentioning the side effects of the drugs as a business tactic becomes a way to increase their sales and profit. The problem has been here for years, and the core is ultimately moral. it needs to be reconsidered to recognize morality, which is a must. (Keefe, 2017).
Analysis of Immorality: Not only ethically but morally speaking too, the way Purdue Pharmacy, as well as other entities, operate in the circle of pharmacy is an act of greed because it is not only the health of people that they have been putting at risk, but also their financial benefits. According to deontological Kantian ethics, the above behavioral pattern should be banned because it blatantly violates the moral foundation, which sees people as an end and not as a device that benefits someone as a tool. This support is also questionable from a practical kind, where the suffering is present for much longer, and the benefits make them non-ethics, such as oxycontin sales, which are very few in number (The Whistleblower 2018).
PART 2
Ethical limits introduction
In the economy of most capitalist systems, morally allotted ethical bonds for the business community cannot be just abstract idealism; their true manifestation is genuine fair play. Undoubtedly, Purdue Pharma has played, if not an entire part, at least the central role in creating the opioid crisis. In contrast, the opioid crisis is a real-life iterative model of business twisted inside out when overstretching ethical boundaries. This crisis exemplifies a dual failure: When one disregards the ethical breach, whether for the pursuit of profit or other self-serving goals, which habitually disfigures, disorients, and displaces a society, prompting discord and cronyism, the business, especially the health care, is at risk; hence there is a dire need for the company, and the health care industry, in particular, to strictly follow and abstain from what is To be exact, the most notable lesson from this is that Purdue Pharma severely called their company-wide moral decay into question through the playing down of the addictive potential that OxyContin could bring despite prior knowledge of the fact that it could lead to drug abuse and consequently to the addiction, which is nothing but a clear indication that this company had no regard for life and health of their fellow human beings.
Specific Immoral Business Practices
Worldwide universally-Global – The company’s destructive medicine practices may be behind the current opioid epidemic, which perhaps demonstrates what can happen in society due to unethical operations. Keeping up with such political measures is rooted in traditional economic egoism and is just thinking of their business and its sound financial status as domination. However, this management model satisfies neither the business interests nor the interests of society. Purdue intentionally switched its efforts from manufacturing actual drug benefits to deceiving caregivers and patients in almost all states with its victorious claim of OxyContin’s “addictive qualities,” which are not at all true for most of its users. Frauds started with how the company cherry-picked results in selected science being presented. This was possible with the scheme to favor data that downplayed perceptions of the risks perceived but combined with data that overemphasized the safety of the use in the long run.
Besides the abuse of regulatory gaps to the use of the company and involvement in lobbying to persuade this process by gentle guidance, such a conclusion unambiguously refers to the maximum benefit of a corporation, which, in reality, is at the cost of the general health. Still, these misdeeds were not just a lack of good manners of war but rather merciless strategies to make money a priority more valuable than the terrible outcome of getting involved in addiction on personal and communal levels. The ethical implications of these tactics are commonly profound and implied two things: At movie finale, a clay of moral depravity is displayed via the circumstances of firstly a misuse of ethical principles which fetches the physic of ‘end justifies the means’ and secondly by disrespecting of the costs human and otherwise of their actions Purdue Pharma, a company that has the scrupulous stance and continues the monetization of the addiction phenomena, by no means, proves to possess a single drop of empathy for the patients as a consequence of which the fatalities from Opium crisis have increased the number of deaths as well as overdoses, (Schroeder & Carlson, 2023). This suggests that the activity is creeping into the market to the point that it has become a norm among businesses where individuals crave money and power beyond the requisite.
The Meaning of These Practices and Their Immorality
Purdue’s sinister act showed just one face of many such cases in the pharma industry. However, the gravest lie in the failure of ethics was exposed as no mere lapse in morality but a systematic deficiency in the pharmaceutical industry. However, it is not stealing that the new business ethics values. It is short-term financial capital maximization with low awareness of changes in long-term culture. It has been seen that intergenerational equity is also a responsibility of every organization that has been performing well economically. It is the case of an institution that is endowed with a holy veneer of support and protection of the public health at any cost but would be turned to be the most reckless and irresponsible institution as soon as it is exposed to the dark side of doing business when it is caught in the act of practicing unscrupulous marketing and questioned deeds in which only the conduct of the honesty and the fundamental principle of the Thus, in analyzing these strategies of the death penalty, you are applying the deontological and consequentialist ethics which both point to the fallible basis for the use of these strategies. Undeniably, the ethical validity of these actions cannot be justified solely from the deontological perspective (Plato, 2022).
On the contrary, this conduct erodes the foundation of central business motives, tampering with intrinsic human value, and purports that everything is a goal, not the subject of the goal. Consequentialism that supports the liabilities of the outcomes of acts argues that these drastic negative impacts in terms of the addictions and death rates were caused by drug marketing. According to Dr. Tamar, the opioid crisis, being a phrase that most of the human population is familiar with, comes with economic and humanistic costs that are bigger than one could have thought. It is a disease that was activated as part of the previous organizations that designed their companies for profitability instead of considering human well-being. Now, we need to have our moral systems redesigned to be able to give suggestions to companies that will rely more.
Conclusion:
However, to prevent the corruption of morals among corporations, implementing such an ethical line is necessary and necessary. This led to the regulation, which has to be fair for all in the spirit of business ethics. The corporate governance system must also be ethical as it is part of business models, and leaders must be ethical when leading. Most of these sectors’ owners and the government take responsibility for the citizens first. The moral limits for them are not a matter of choice but rather a sense of duty that should be extensively carried out for the atmosphere and the safety of the people. This decision will probably carry exceptional consequences if the pharmaceutical behemoth called Purdue Pharma is found guilty of not keeping the ethical code that its leaders adhered to; then it just might cry the next time; history insists that all businesses must grow to serve the interests of the society only may be the possible choice Being a particular method of the fight against all the social issues connected with the environment such as pollution, deprivation and crises of gender, movement, financial and social development is only the second method of the approach to the economic development – business ethics.
Reference
Purdue Pharma and the Opioid Crisis
Keefe, P.R. (2017). The family that built an empire of pain, The New Yorker. Available at: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/30/the-family-that-built-an-empire-of-pain.
Van Zee, A. (2009). The promotion and marketing of Oxycontin: Commercial Triumph, public health tragedy, American Journal of Public Health. Available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2622774/.
The Whistleblower (2018) YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hd-43K-rdQA&t=104s.
“The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power” (documentary): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y888wVY5hzw
Plato (2022) The Ring of Gyges, Philosophical Thought. Available at: https://open.library.okstate.edu/introphilosophy/chapter/the-ring-of-gyges.
Dr. Tamar Gendler’s lecture on the “Ring of Gyges”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTGc1Pyp-Jc&t=3s
A Business Ethics Reader, 4th Edition Chapter 5 Is “The Social Responsibility of Business … to Increase Its Profits”? Social Responsibility and Stakeholder Theory https://www.amazon.com/Honest-Work-Business-Ethics-Reader/dp/0190497688
Schroeder, J. L., & Carlson, D. G. (2023). Third-Party Releases under the Bankruptcy Code after Purdue Pharma. Am. Bankr. Inst. L. Rev., pp. 31, 1.
write