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Ethical And Ethical Ethics Of The Food Industry Essay

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Using antibiotics in the food industry is immoral in multiple ways because they threaten the safety of the general public and create harm to the environment. It is our moral responsibility as engineers to come up with a solution that will better protect our well-being and the animals and plants around us. Utilitarian and Kantian ethical theories support this view, while ethical risk assessment should be a part of coming up with a solution.
Antibiotics came into the commercial setting in the 1940s, when penicillin began to be used to treat infections. Shortly after, livestock and poultry farmers began to integrate antibiotics into their conventional farming methods. Now, less than a hundred years later, 70% of all antibiotics that are used in human medicine are also used in agriculture and livestock, while 80% of all antibiotics in the U.S. are used in animals. Although this has increased meat and poultry production and lowered the cost for consumers, we are on a treacherous path to reversing the last 100 years of advanced medical discoveries.
Antibiotics are injected into animals and plants in order to grow them faster, larger, and to prevent diseases from spreading in their dirty “factory farm conditions.” Factory farms are an unnatural way of raising poultry and other meats, but have become the prevailing method. The animals are kept in sheds with no space to move around and many never see sunlight in their entire life spans. Animals are forced to gain up to 4 to 5% more

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