Smoking and Ethics

Smoking and Ethics

One can examine the ethics of smoking from different perspectives. From a moral realism perspective, smoking is unethical. This conclusion is supported by different facts that involve the dangers of smoking to an individual and society (BBC, 2014). The individual suffers from respiratory and cardiovascular diseases due to smoking and affects those who inhale second-hand smoke. In addition, the marketing campaigns that tobacco companies hold to promote cigarettes are unethical because they fail to provide sufficient information for decision-making (American Lung Association, 2021; The Scandal of Big Tobacco’s Behaviour in the Developing World, 2017). The failure to highlight the comparative risk that is associated with smoking denies the users a chance to make the right decisions (Franck, 2016).

As an individual, I disapprove of smoking because it makes an environment inhabitable for non-smokers, leads to the development of unpleasant breaths, and endangers the health of users (World Health Organisation, 2018). This is a subjectivist perspective, which is based on my views, feelings, and perspectives (Velasquez, 2021). In addition, the decision to market smoking as an ideal among women and cite the idea of freedom is misleading for young women. This marketing connotation is misleading because it wrongly defines freedom and associates it with harmful behaviors that could endanger an individual’s health.

When I was younger, I had a friend who used to smoke secretly in the washrooms. When asked, he would say that his parents smoked freely in the house, especially when things seemed difficult. The parents also left cigarettes in different places in the house, making them accessible to the children. The younger children would chew these cigarettes and throw them away as a child would while playing. However, the older ones lit the cigarettes and smoked as they saw their parents doing. Some were caught and warned. However, they continued to smoke since the cigarettes still lay around the house, and the parents continued to smoke in their presence. My friend became addicted and could not spend a few hours without rushing to the washrooms to smoke. This habit became dangerous when he developed chest problems. Since he was asthmatic, he would experience congestion more often. Whenever he visited the school doctor, he denied coming into contact with cigarettes and did not follow up with his medication. Eventually, he had a serious asthma attack, which led to his demise. The parents learned of his smoking addiction after his death and felt guilty for their behavior. Instead of ceasing smoking, they continued to smoke because they lacked better ways to manage their stress and grief. This experience instilled in me a fear of any substances that can lead to addiction. The fun in beginning something that looks adventurous may end in sadness.

One may claim that the government has measures in place to protect non-smokers. These measures include the establishment of smoking zones (van der Eijk & Porter, 2015). However, the smoking zones do not eliminate or mitigate the risks that smokers face. The measures cannot also be applied in areas such as homes, where children who are exposed to second-hand smoke may develop health problems. While individuals are free to make choices related to smoking, their harm to other members of society undermines the necessity or importance of this autonomy. The harm to oneself in the long term undermines the validity of the freedom to decide whether to smoke. Therefore, the current measures are insufficient in controlling the harm that smoking has on other individuals and smokers as well (WHO, n.d). This makes smoking completely unethical due to the negative results.

References

American Lung Association. (2021). 10 Really Bad Things the Tobacco Industry Has Done to Entice Kids to Start Smoking. Retrieved from https://www.lung.org/research/sotc/by-the-numbers/10-bad-things-to-entice-kids

BBC. (2014). Ethics guide. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/introduction/intro_1.shtml

Franck, C. (2016). Ethical considerations of e-cigarette use for tobacco harm reduction. Respiratory Research, 17(53). doi:https://doi.org/10.1186/s12931-016-0370-3

The scandal of big tobacco’s behavior in the developing world. (2017).

van der Eijk, Y., & Porter, G. (2015). Human rights and ethical considerations for a tobacco-free generation. Tobacco Control, 24(3), 238-242.

Velasquez, M. (2021). What is Ethics? Retrieved from https://www.scu.edu/ethics/ethics-resources/ethical-decision-making/what-is-ethics/

WHO. (n.d). Tobacco Explained: The truth about the tobacco industry…in its Own Words. Retrieved from https://www.who.int/tobacco/media/en/TobaccoExplained.pdf

World Health Organisation. (2018). WHO global report on trends in prevalence of tobacco smoking 2000–2025. WHO.

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Smoking and Ethics

CULTURE, TIME, AND BUSINESS ETHICS
Signature Assignment for Information Literacy—Introduced Level
The goal of this Session Long Project:

This assignment is the second of four SLPs where you will be building a bank of takeaways pertaining to ethical and/or unethical behaviors.

Begin by reading the following scenario for SLP 2:

When Even Doctors Smoked

From the 1940s to the 1970s, cigarettes were as common as water bottles are today. Nearly everyone smoked, from judges in court to factory workers and pregnant women. Edward Bernays, the Austrian-American founder of the field of public relations, promoted smoking among women in a 1929 campaign in New York City in which he marketed Lucky Strike cigarettes as “torches of freedom” that would lead to equality between men and women.
However, by the late 1960s, and in the wake of the release of the landmark Surgeon General’s report on “Smoking and Health” on January 11, 1964, it had become clear that there was a direct link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. Subsequent research has added heart and lung diseases, stroke, and diabetes. Smoking has decreased in Western countries but remains well established in the global East and South, where cigarette manufacturers actively promote the products in markets like Brazil, China, Russia, and Singapore, especially among young people.
Are such practices ethical? Why or why not?

Source: Byars and Stanberry (2018), pgs. 140-141.

The following source should also be useful to you as a reference:

World Health Organization. (2018). WHO Global Report on Trends in Prevalence of Tobacco Smoking 2000-2025 (2nd Ed.), pp. 11-18. Retrieved from https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/272694/9789241514170-eng.pdf?ua=1.

This assignment asks you to:

Express your reactions
Apply your own background/experiences
State important takeaways
Add other comments you would like to make
Your SLP submission should be 2-pages of text, well-organized, well-written, and 100% error-free. You may use first- or third-person voice. Write in full sentences and demonstrate your critical-thinking skills. Be creative (for example, add color and/or small graphics).

Note: In this SLP, we have introduced the importance of library research. Going forward, support your arguments with sources from the Trident Online Library. This is an expectation at the graduate level.
Additional Requirements for this SLP Assignment:

Utilize 3 sources of information from the Trident Online Library, one from each of the following:
A book from Skillsoft Books 24×7
A periodical from ProQuest Central
An Internet source
Include an Appendix at the end of your paper (add it just after your References page). In the appendix for each source, discuss why you chose to use it in your paper and what factors you used to determine whether they were appropriate.
Information Literacy Emphasis