Essay Ethical Issuses of Tobacco Companies in The Insider

The movie The Insider literally provides a seeing glass perspective into the summation of ethical issues in businesses that directly affects the consumers physical and psychological health and the alleged methods that the tobacco company would resort to in order to safe guard itself from litigation and from disclosing information that will adversely affect the sale of its sole money making product yet is ultimately crucial to its customers understanding of the contents of the product that they are purchasing and its implications on their personal health. There are several ethical philosophies in play here regarding the tobacco company and these ethical issues can be explored by analyzing the myriad of interplay of relationships†¦show more content†¦Of course one could quote ethical egoism here and argue that whatever the business of a company is, it is not responsible for its consumers and is right in selling its products for profits and every individual has the right to pr otect their interests which in this case would be their individual freedom to smoke cigarettes and evaluate by themselves how harmful smoking is to them. But this principal is based on an assumption that both entities; business and consumers are isolated from each other and information about cigarettes are available to all without discrimination. And this is of course is a very false assumption as we see in the movie of the continuous denial of the tobacco company in a lawsuit and under oath of the harmful effects and addictiveness of cigarettes due to nicotine and other carcinogenic substances in it. The obvious trick used by the seven executives of the tobacco company or â€Å"seven dwarves† in a lawsuit against them is the misuse of one of the arguments for lying to protect trade secrets in business by denying that they know that the substances in its product such as nicotine and coumarin is addictive and harmful to the user or smoker. Thus in conclusion the business itsel f is based on a premise of knowingly selling products that are absolutely injurious to the health of the consumer yet defending its interests by invoking their rights as a business to protect itself from disclosing information that will be used by other