The Ethics of Food Term Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

The Ethics of Food - Term authorship ExampleEthical considerations with respect to the aliment industry are a maze of complex drumheads that peg virtuous responsibility on any number of different sources, whether consumers, producers, the media, the government, or scientists. In the increasely composite feed production process, there are many steps in the process where things could be positively changed and such positive changes could be introduced by any of these ethical food sources. Ethics is the philosophical moot of moral values and rules. Applied to food, this means a study of what values and rules ought to be embraced as the average for the production and consumption of food through each step of the process. An ethical motive of food is particularly authoritative because food is essential to human life. For instance, to deny a person food for any prolonged current will inevitably lead to that persons death. Although the denial of a specific person food for a time is n ot subject to ethical debate, millions of people each year die of yearning that could be prevented in theory. Here, we will examine the sources of ethical duty within the food production process, commencement with governments and ending with scientists. This analysis depends, in large part, on an overview of theory with a great deal of trial-and-error application and comparison to real life. When dealing with an applied ethical issue such as the ethics of food, it is particularly important to bear in mind that ones philosophical conclusions deliver real real and widespread effects on human life. Sources that serve as a general entryway to the ethics of food often take the form of a series of questions, of which there are everlastingly more than there are answers. All of these questions have something to do with the distinction between an ethical and an unethical act. For instance, a question might be Is buying local food always better for the surround? (Prince, et al., 2007, p. 2). This question implicates food consumers most directly, but also food producers. The explicit moral value is the environs namely, how does one best achieve what is best for the environment, which is taken to be morally superior to an act that degrades the environment. The moral duty implied for consumers in this question revolves around the issue of how one goes about helping the environment, and an answer to this question (if it exists) would make this moral duty more clear. Additionally, the question presumes some role of producers in helping the environment namely, that by producing and selling foods locally, food producers can help the environment in ways that previous generations of producers have not been able to. Accordingly, every question posed in the ethics of food should be address in this manner first, identifying to what or to whom the question implies we have a moral obligation to, secondly identifying the constitution of that moral obligation, and thirdly spec ifically who bears that moral obligation. An additional preliminary comment is that moral obligations about food choices bear weight. The objection that food choice, or the ethics of food, does not really matter will not work. The majority of Americans deal with obesity, which affects the American workforce, healthcare costs, and a degraded environment. Unhealthy food choices lead to decrease brain function, developmental problems in children, and malnutrition from a lack of vital nutrients. Environmentally, poor diets compromise our resources by increasing the need for pesticides and fertilizers that corrupt lakes, streams, and oceans, creates disease in livestock, and releases greenhouse gases that cause irreversible damage in cost of global warming. At current trends, this kind of diet will lead to even more crucial social problems in the future ( youthfulness & Leehr, 2009). In this sense, one cannot claim that food choices do not matter, or that ethics does not have a role i n which direction Americans take. At this point, as Young and Leehr (2009) contend, it does not matter which side of the debate between agri-business