Walmart Challenger Case Analysis

How do you determine if one action is right or wrong? According to one of the most influential and persuasive approaches to normal ethics in many philosophy, an action oriented moral theory known as utilitarianism holds that an action is right if it produces, or if it tends produce, the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people affected by the action. Utilitarian believes that the purpose of having morals is to be able to make life better by increasing happiness or pleasure and decrease the amount of unhappiness and pain in the world. Although we are often faced with many moral dilemmas in this world, specific cases such as Nestle and Advertising, Challenger, Children and Targeting, Emails and Privacy, One Nation Under Wal-Mart, …show more content…
In order to evaluate this case, it’s necessary to use the rule utilitarianism as the prominent type of utilitarianism. The Rule Utilitarian stress the importance of moral rules. It judges the morality of an individual actions by referencing it to a more general moral rules. They apply the utilitarian principle directly to the evaluation of rules and then evaluate individual actions by seeing if they obey or disobey those rules whose acceptance will produce the most utility. And according to Jeremy Betham’s Hedonic Calculus to measure the overall utility of an action, we must subtract possible pains from possible pleasure that the act can provide. However, in the Challenger Case, although the benefits of proceeding the launch on time could produce the most utility for the greatest number of persons in the company and overall participants of the project such as fame and recognition, long term profitability, and contract with NASA, it cannot be morally right to continue with the launch even though the amount of pain was only result in a death of seven people. The reason for this is because the “best” action we could possibly perform can be seen as extreme, impractical, and oppressive. In addition, it isn’t always clear that the “best” action is always available to us. If we can clearly know that the Challenger will not fail and produce good result without negligible bad results, then that action is rational. A utilitarian would respond to this complaint by breaking subordinate rules. And they use a direct utility calculation: when you are in an unusual situation that the rules don’t cover, when the subordinate rules conflict, when you are deciding which rules to adopt or