BP is held responsible for the worst U.S. offshore in history, where 11 rig workers were killed in an explosion in April 2010, and the resulting 200 million gallons of crude which spilled into the sea. They are responsibe for their failure to provide the protection and safety for their worker and the environment.
The Obama administration, as a reaction to this crisis, decided to further enforce and mandate the regulation and safety procedures on offshore drilling practices. However, Congress has yet to pass a single legislation regarding this issue.
This issue raises several ethical questions which includes:
1. Who should be responsible for such disasters, the firm or the individual person(s)
2. Should the firm/person be liability or criminally charged for such disaster, and how will they affect (or not affect) the action of the firm in the future
3.To what extent should the public good be sacrificed for maximizing profit for a business firm, and how should they resolve such conflict between the different stakeholders
4. How should the government be effective changed that they are preventing and not only reacting to these issues
Source:
Dina Cappiello. “BP ultimately responsible in Gulf spill”. Yahoo! News. extracted from the internet September 14, 2011.
http://news.yahoo.com/report-bp-ultimately-responsible-gulf-spill-174211824.html
I believe that this accident or disaster is not one man’s responsibility but a team’s and in a bigger scale the whole corporation’s. My reason behind this is that for every job especially a job like this, there are supervisors or maintenance workers that constantly check for the safety of the machinery. So it is not one man’s responsibility but a team’s. Of course the corporation will never forget what happened here and hopefully they will learn from their mistakes and be more responsible in future operations. I believe that it is a selfish act for one to sacrifice the goods of others to maximize profit. I am tired of hearing what the government wants to do but do not see their plan been put into action. In the future, the government should take more role on the decision making of operation that could have big impact to the environment and society around it.