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The Doctrine of Double Effect, Deadly Drugs, and Business Ethics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2015

Lawrence Masek
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Abstract:

Manuel Velasquez and F. Neil Brady apply the doctrine of double effect to business ethics and conclude that the doctrine allows a pharmaceutical company to sell a drug with potentially fatal side effects only if it also has the good effect of saving lives. This forbids the sale of many common products, such as automobiles and alcohol. My account preserves the virtues of the doctrine of double effect without making it too restrictive. I apply the doctrine to a pharmaceutical company’s decision to market a drug with dangerous side effects and argue that free markets often offer the best way to compare the good and bad effects of business decisions. I conclude that the doctrine does allow a business to sell a potentially fatal product that does not save lives, provided that it warns consumers about the danger.

Type
Articles
Information
Business Ethics Quarterly , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , April 2000 , pp. 483 - 495
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Business Ethics 2000

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References

Notes

2 Business Ethics Quarterly 7 (1997): 83–107.

3 Cf. The New Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume IV (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America, 1967), p. 1021.

4 For a summary of this tradition, see “Natural Law and Business Ethics.”

5 The New Catholic Encyclopedia, p. 1021.

6 I ignore the difficulties involved in just war theory in order to clarify DDE. For discussion of DDE in the context of just war theory, see Paul Christopher’s The Ethics of War and Peace (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1994).

7 ”Natural Law and Business Ethics,” p. 95.

8 Velasquez and Brady could say that the agent lacks a proportionately grave reason to allow the bad effect if the agent has an alternative way that will achieve the good effect without the bad effect. My formulation of DDE makes this need to consider alternatives more explicit.

9 Nicholas Monsarrat, The Cruel Sea (London: Cassell, 1954).

10 The New Catholic Encyclopedia, p. 1021.

11 Helga Kuhse, “Euthanasia,” in A Companion to Ethics, ed. Peter Singer (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, Ltd., 1993), p. 300.

12 Directors and Boards 20 (1996): 13–17.

13 ”The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits,” New York Times Magazine, September 13, 1970. Friedman also makes this argument in Chapter VIII of Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1962).

14 This section supposes that Virilium might cause severe nausea; the next section that it might lead to deaths. I reach the same conclusion in both sections.

15 I exclude mentally incompetent, including children and the insane, from the first premise. Clearly, we should not allow children or psychopathic killers to play with chainsaws. However, I ignore the difficult question of how to define mental incompetence.

16 Matthew 7:12.

17 This example resembles the case of Tylenol in 1982, when several people died from cyanide-laced Tylenol capsules. Tylenol’s producer, Johnson and Johnson, replaced the capsules with tamper-proof caplets. If Johnson and Johnson had sold both the capsules and the caplets, the capsules probably would not have made a profit.