Explain The Kantian Theory Of Violation Of Morality

Working conditions in which employees are placed in unsafe working conditions, paid low wages, working long hours, and even sometimes children are put to work are all conditions in which our society believes to be morally impermissible. While our society believes that this is morally impermissible and we have outlawed it in our country, we continue to support the use of these practices by purchasing items from retailers that obtain their products in this manner. The use of products obtained in this way are morally impermissible when looking at it using Kantian deontology. The Kantian theory of Formulation of Humanity is the best support for why multi-national enterprises are morally impermissible. The multi-national enterprises have a moral …show more content…
The buying of these products is immoral because it is encouraging these practices when you purchase the items. When we purchase products of multi-national enterprises that utilize these practices we are implicitly consenting to the practices because we are choosing to buy the products despite knowing the workers are working in immoral conditions. The people that are working in these conditions are also not informed on how much the company is profiting on each item of clothing or what work conditions are morally acceptable in society. This means that they cannot fully consent to the immoral conditions that they working in. We also fail to respect the persons working in the multi-national enterprise’s factories using immoral conditions because we are more concerned with saving money when buying clothing that we accept other people are being paid low …show more content…
They would argue that it is moral because there are no laws in the countries that the factories are located in that say it is illegal to utilize these practices. People that believe the working conditions of multi-national enterprises are moral would use the theory of cultural relativism to argue that in the culture that these conditions are being practiced it is moral. Cultural relativism looks at the practices within the culture from their point of view and not from another cultures point of view, however, even when using cultural relativism the practice of the exploitative working conditions disrespects the workers. The disrespect of the workers violates a universal law according to Kant and results in the practice being immoral. When managers of these factories do not use self-legislation to follow universal laws, they are using morally impermissible