Ethical issues in bottled water: Is bottled water ethical - Research Paper Example

Proponents of bottled water have argued that bottled water provides an opportunity to promote environmental sustainability through facilitating sustainable use the natural resources (Mittelstaedt 2008). Contrary, bottled water has been interpreted as unsustainable through assertions that the process of bottling, distribution and the packaging amount to increased fuel consumption and environmental threat. (Bartol, Canney, Cunningham, Flaherty & McNamee 2011). This paper seeks to unveil the ethical dilemma surrounding bottled water in move to determine its ethical standing relation to the environment.

Environmental ethical issues surrounding bottled water can be well-understood through theories such as the consequential and the non-consequential moral theories. The Consequential ethical theory lies with the tenets of utilitarianism and has been widely applied by environmental activists to garner support for certain environmental actions as well as oppose perceived non-friendly environmental actions. The morality of actions or decisions should be judged on the basis of consequences in which the best action is the one that results in best overall good (Strike & Soltis 2004).

Although the theory focuses on the support for actions capable of eliciting the greatest happiness for majority of the people, it has been redefined to imply the need to maximize on aggregate utility of an action. According to Floyd (2010), anthropocentric environmental ethicists view the environment as of instrumental value in which the value of the environment resides in its utility to human ends. In this case, the ethical dilemma surrounding bottled could be resolved through examination of all processes involved in the production to determine the overall utility value to the well-being of the people.

Based on the consequential theory, bottled water can only be termed as ethical if it does not harm