Question

CASE 1 Business Ethics owns a commercial bakery in Georgia that produces a variety of goods sold in grocery stores. Trevor is required by law to perform internal tests on food produced at his plant to check for contamination. On three occasions, the tests of food products containing peanut butter were positive for salmonella contamination. Trevor was not required to report the results to US Food and Drug Administration officials, however, so he did not. Instead, Trevor instructed his employees to simply repeat the tests until the results were negative. Meanwhile, the products that had originally tested positive to salmonella were shipped out to retailers. Five people who ate Trevor's baked goods that year became seriously ill, and one person died from a salmonella infection. The legal environment of business/ 9 edition/chapter 4) Answer the Following question: 1- If Trevor had followed the six guidelines for making ethical business decisions, would he still have sold the contaminated goods? Why or why not? (5 marks)

Answer 1

In the given case Trevor has followed the six guidelines for making ethical business decisions. Those guidelines are itself set for an organisation to follow the ethics when they are stuck in a situation where their behavior and decision making gets affected against their self interest.

In the given situation Trevor conducted the tests on the food produced by them as required by law and the main purpose of the test itself was to give an assurance that the food products are free from contamination, whether they are making the products that are best fitted for the consumers or not which in turn is a requirement to follow the ethics and act as per the principles of ethics.

Though here Trevor conducted the tests and the results were positive which is a serious concern. Here according to the guidelines of ethics he should have destroyed the products in which there were contamination and replace the materials that contains the contamination and make the fresh one for the consumers.

Instead he did none of the above and served the products to the consumers due to which they fall seriously ill and even died. This practice is totally against the guidelines of ethical business decisions.

So we can say that though Trevor has followed the guidelines he has sold the consumers contaminated goods because the main purpose of the tests itself was to give him the awareness that he serves the society in an ethical manner or not but he did not replaced the food products and took the necessary steps as per the guidelines for making the ethical decision and his decision was against that.