¶ … Ethical Problem With Exporting Pollution
The choice to relocate an American plant in a third-world country is ethically unjustifiable to whatever extent operating the same plant would be environmentally unsound or legally prohibited in the United States. It would only be ethically permissible to the extent the decision was unrelated to shifting the risk or burden of environmental consequences to the third world.
More particularly, where the choice is intended to shift the risk of disease out of the U.S. Or to avoid statutory prohibition or costly regulatory domestic requirements, the utilitarian ethical perspective in particular would oppose the proposed plant relocation on two specific grounds. First, the utilitarian ethical system would oppose the relocation on the grounds that it amounts to using other nations as a means to ends sought by citizens of this nation; that is a clear violation of one of Kant's fundamental utilitarian principles (Rosenstand, 2008). Second, while the proposed plant relocation arguably does not necessarily violate Kant's other fundamental principle of benefiting the greatest number at the lowest possible human cost, the shifting of the environmental risks from the population of those who derive the benefits of the decision to the population of those who do not benefit from it also raises an ethical issue.
That particular ethical concern may be harder to define precisely, simply because it may be too restrictive and no different from the types of decisions considered appropriate in the U.S. In that regard, provided it violates no domestic or foreign laws and that it is not undertaken for the purpose of shifting the environmental risk (Rosenstand, 2008), the relocation is no different from situating a similar plant in any local community that does not benefit from the existence of the plant.
References
Rosenstand, N. (2008). The Moral of the Story: An Introduction to Ethics. New York:
McGraw-Hill
