Utilitarianism Deontology And Virtue Ethics Essay

Before I discuss how utilitarianism, deontology, and virtue ethics would respond to what took place, I am first going to briefly describe the situation. “While most of the population slept during the night of December 3, 1984, a toxic cloud of over forty tons of methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas escaped from the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, central India. Heavier than air, the gas blanketed the slums surrounding the facility and spread over the city of 800,000 people. At least 2,000 died immediately, although local estimates run into the tens of thousands.” (Ethics and Business: An Introduction, Kevin Gibson, 2007, page 1) This situation had a lot of harmful effects on the population such as weakened immune systems, cancer began to spread more, growth defects, and also miscarriages began to happen more frequently than normal. As defined in the notes given in class, utilitarianism means “an action is right as long as it promotes the greatest good for the greatest number of people.” As defined in the text it is “actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness. By happiness is intended pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain and …show more content…
That information came from my lecture notes that was taken during class. So, in this situation, virtue ethics wouldn’t necessarily look at what actually happened, but would look at the person that caused this disaster. The person that is responsible for this is Warren Anderson, which was the CEO of Union Carbide. Virtue ethics would look at what type of person Warren is and then will decide if his actions was morally wrong. If Warren was a bad, vicious person then virtue ethics would consider his actions morally