Agent Orange Ethical Issues

Monsanto, new and old alike, have a moral obligation to society since it utilizes technology to enhance human lives. Essentially, it would have been in the best interest of the company to continuously protect society and the environment from the potentially harmful consequences of its products. According to ethic experts Hartline and Ferrell operating under the “Old Monsanto” regime, in 1970, the company introduced a chemical named Agent Orange to our military and it was drastically used as an asset in the Vietnam War (2014, p.309). In addition, Agent Orange was used to deforest thick Vietnamese jungles, assisting in United States advantage; however, Agent Orange contained dioxin, which is extremely hazardous and causes cancer (2014, p.310). Researchers confirmed that the Vietnamese food and crops were contaminated with dioxin, and

Basically, the government had approved for the use of Agent Orange. New York Times reports that it took United States forty years to finally addressed the environmental effects of the long war (Fuller, 2012). Not to mention, the United States military had sprayed so much dioxin, the damages were large as New Jersey (2012), in terms of size and volume. The government was under scrutiny because they only addressed one site of the many affected by dioxin, and it took four decades to execute any type of cleanup and for them to take an ownership in the tragedy (2012). Dioxin most certainly affected the communities of Vietnam because it is highly poisonous. Agent Orange affected Vietnam for three generations (Black, 2015) post-environmental exposure. Farmers were unknowingly returning to barren fatal fields of corn, cassava, peanuts and rice patties (2015) in hopes of resuming harvest. For Monsanto to still be linked to such generational turmoil and accounted for so millions of deaths, they clearly have failed at fulfilling their moral obligation to