Ethics is crucial in every organization as it defines its public image. Ethics portrays a firm’s public image through how the workforce behaves. The way individuals in a company work and make decisions govern their attitudes and desires, impact, and even organize their personal lives and behaviors. Recently companies have violated animal rights by testing consumer goods before supplying them to consumers. The practice is unethical as using animals as lab rats for experimental products is against ordinary human ethics and animal rights. Some companies use animals as lab rats, and even after finding something is wrong with their product, they still go ahead and supply it to consumers. Using animals for testing purposes has its advantages and disadvantages.
Organizations test animals to acquire information that they can use to anticipate future customer complaints on injuries incurred through their products. They may try on a particular species of animal which has similar body responses as a human being. Companies producing household goods are the most commonly affected by allegations of injuries caused by a product. When companies experience this kind of allegation, they try to solve the issue in court to avoid exposure to unreliable testing practices before entering the market. The reason to settle out of the court is that a company winning against an injured consumer is minimum.
Some ethical concepts can support animal rights, such as utilitarianism theory, Kantian ethics, and virtue ethics. These concepts express different ideas on human behavior towards everything, either living or non-living (Ciulla et al., 2011). According to virtue ethics, it would be wrong for firms to use animals as la ats for their products as the concept believes in doing the right thing based on human instincts. Virtue ethics concenaes on the rightness and wrongness of an individual’s deeds and offers direction to people on the traits and conducts a good person would seek to achieve. A virtuous individual would not under any circumstance wish to subject an innocent animal to tests that risk the health of that animal, or even the existence of the tests are dangerous. Using animals to test consumer products is unethical, considering character-based ethics.
Using animals such as cows to test medicines in the healthcare sector is unethical. Some of the drugs getting tested may be vital to humans, and people can be exposed to dangerous infections through eating meat from these animals used as lab rats. For example, when Covid19 uncovered itself, different scientists in medicine tried to come up with a possible vaccine. To test the vaccines, the scientists needed to subject an animal with the virus then afterward try to inject it with the potential vaccine generated and see if it would work. If the vaccine is inaccurate, the animal dies or, even worse, it exposes people to the virus if they contact them.
According to Kantian ethics, nothing in the world or beyond can be contemplated as good without restrictions except goodwill (White, 2020). There is no other virtue as pure as goodwill since all the other virtues can be used to achieve immoral ends. Using goodwill as morality, it is unethical for companies to use animals to test consumer products. Goodwill is a broader principle than a will that acts from duty. This means that when companies use animals as lab rats, they are going against their will of responsibility to protect the moral law, which is animal rights.
Another ethical concept that can discredit animals’ use in testing consumer products is the utilitarianism theory. Over the years, there have been discussions about whether it is ethically correct to use animals to test consumer products before they are marketed. Under these discussions, society seems to be unhappy about the doings of these companies. Based on utilitarianism theory, companies are wrong since their actions are causing unhappiness to the majority of people in society. Companies should aim for the betterment of society as a whole (Ramboarisata & Gendron, 2019). For this same reason, they should avoid unnecessarily harming animals in the name of testing. The testing results do not matter to them as in one or another, and their products are released into the market.
On the other hand, there are advantages of using animals to test goods before taking them for human consumption. Companies are responsible for ensuring that they deliver quality and healthy products failure to which they may be liable. If a company is caught up in the middle of consumer injuries due to unhealthy products, most likely consumable goods, then they may face company closure or be charged high fines. For this reason, companies test their products on animals to ensure they have all proof that the goods they provide are of quality and free from any harmful substance to humans (Szablewska & Kubacki, 2019). This concept can be termed a rights-based ethics system. Every individual has a right to life. For that purpose, firms ensure testing products before supplying them to avoid unhealthy products that may deprive an individual of his right to life.
Although there have been other alternatives that could be used in place of animals during testing, in cosmetic testing, there are several products such as sunscreens, anti-dandruff shampoos, and anti-acne creams that cannot be tested without the use of animals (Wang et al., 2020). In this case, it would be unethical not to try the chemicals justifying by using animal rights. People and society should be the top priority when it comes to health care. It would be against all ethical theories not to test the chemicals before using them; therefore, for cosmetics, the use of animals for experimenting is ethically acceptable.
A firm can be termed unethical in using animals to experiment on their products if they have another alternative to choose. However, they still decide to stick to harming animals. The medical sector is entitled to the use of animals for trials and the alternative use of patient drug databases, computer models and simulations, and virtual drug trials (Meigs et al., 2018). Companies especially those that deal with cosmetics are not allowed to use animals in trying their products, instead they are advised to use other alternatives such as computer model and simulation. According to Food and Drug Administration (FDA), it is unethical to use animals in testing consumer goods, but companies still go ahead and use them for protection purposes (Avila et al., 2020). Some animals such as goats and pigs are used an meat by humans and therefore it is unethical to subject them into chemicals in the name of testing. Companies should focus on production of high-quality products are not capable of harming humans and animals during experimentations.
From medical organizations to restaurants, conventional businesses must consider the rising public realization of the behavioral treatment of animals. This developing worry has specific outcomes for agribusiness regarding the type of creatures that are contemplated suitable to eat. Companies that have choices in testing other than animals should cease harassing creatures based on product experimental. Some of the animals used by companies to test consumer products are the same animals in restaurant menus, such as cows. Using animals that are consumable by humans exposes people to harmful diseases and injuries that may result from some chemicals subjected to the animal as a means of product testing. It is our duty as humans to ensure that every decision one makes is of goodwill and is purely made to favor the thought of the majority within society. Companies should consider using other testing alternatives.
References
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Ciulla, J. B., Martin, C. W., & Solomon, R. C. (2011). Honest work: A business ethics reader.
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Wang, Y., Zhao, Y., & Song, F. (2020). The ethical issues of animal testing in cosmetics industry. Humanities and Social Sciences, 8(4), 112-116.
White, M. (2020). Kantian ethics and economics. Stanford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780804777636
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