This week’s lecture was quite interesting and explanatory about the ethical philosophies from Aristotle and Kent to Bentham and Mill! I believe that people in the past and nowadays have expanded their mindsets and think differently, for instance, Aristotle was an absolutist, that for a specific situation there is only one solution for it (for example, the king of the country has the divine judgment, or trying to solve a mathematic problem that has a specific method to solve). I personally don’t support that theory, because I don’t believe that things have only one answer which is absolute. I believe in the relativism, which any situation doesn’t have a single and absolute solution but it has multiple (for example, when the body produces some symptoms it could be multiple cases, either a virus or an allergy or something else, or mostly used in philosophical riddles, which they rarely have a single answer).
During time, people started to believe more in the perspective of relativism and so do I due to the freedom of solutions and no moral restrictions.
I wanted to give an example using Amazon’s big scandal last year that was brought up by the employees that worked in the warehouses.
Amazon’s employees didn’t feel safe working at the warehouses during the pandemic because of their poor working conditions. Many people tried to reach the HR, unfortunately, they didn’t had any chance to raise their complains there and decided to organise a protest using the media to seek their rights. The outcome of these actions weren’t that good for Amazon and the company actually fired their protesting employees because they spoke about their rights. The spokesperson of the company claimed:
“We respect the rights of employees to protest and recognize their legal right to do so, but these rights do not provide blanket immunity against bad actions, particularly those that endanger the health, wellbeing or safety of their colleagues.” They added: “With over 1,000 sites around the world, and so many measures and precautions rapidly rolled out over the past several weeks across safety, pay, benefits and operational processes, there may be instances where we don’t get it perfect, but can assure you that’s just what they’ll be – exceptions.” https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/may/05/amazon-protests-union-organizing-cracking-down-workers
By analysing their response, we can see that Amazon does not feel reponsible for the actions that they have made and points out that the company does not care about their staff. Looking from the ethics point of view, we can see that the theory that best suits this company is the utilitarianism, which is mostly used in the politics and says that “the action is right if it’s results provide happiness for the greater number of people in the society“. As well as the absolutist theory also applies in this case, because the company has rules, which have to be followed no matter the circumstances.
Someone could say that Amazon is just using an alternative solution to their problem but using relativism just for the personal best profit without considering the damaging outcome to the other parties of the situation is nearly tyranny. Such division on rights is not good in any society.
In conclusion, any person should get the rights to express but he should consider that the specific action may cause damage to other people. Amazon could have approach the specific problem a bit differently which would benefit both parties, the employees and the company.
What do you think about this matter? Which ethical philosophy suits you better? I would be glad if you would share your opinion in the comments!
Thank you for reading my blog post this week and I hope that you have really liked it!
Kristiyana Urumova 