Summary of Cornco Case Study

In considering the Cornco and the contaminated corn case study, I think there are a number of actual and potential ethical violations based on the Underwood Personal Ethical Model. George Wilson, who is the operations manager of the CornCo plant is clearly having difficulty with trying to decide if it is right for him to continue to use contaminated corn to manufacture corn chips. To maintain market share, lower production costs, and increase the company’s profits, Wilson is being pressured by CornCo’s vice president Jake Lamont to force grain elevator operators to sell to CornCo all their contaminated corn at a discount rate of 50%. If Wilson agrees to do this, the contaminated corn chips Cornco is already producing will increase the level of contamination higher than the current level of 10%.

Wilson is also being pressured from inside the company. CornCo’s employees are beginning to understand that if Wilson doesn’t make the decision to continue to use contaminated corn, production cost will increase which will result in employees being laid off. Therefore, some employees are encouraging Wilson to continue with the practice of using contaminated corn. After voicing his concern to Lamont that buying even more contaminated corn would lead to even higher levels of contained chips, Lamont informs Wilson that the company would stop shipping contaminated corn to U.S. markets, and began to ship the contaminated corn to Mexico.

In contrast to absolutism, were the view is that some things are wrong for everyone, everywhere, and every time regardless of whether the person thinks they are wrong or not, this is a case of relativism where what one individual thinks is wrong may not, in the opinion of that person, be wrong for them. In using Underwood’s Personal Ethical Model, I would say that both Wilson and Lamont are in violation of the model’s first step, which is to ask the question does a decision violate a moral absolute? Clearly, the answer in this case is yes. Notwithstanding reports from company testers that aflatoxin had been detected in the cheap corn, Wilson and Lamont continued to blend the contaminated corn with uncontaminated corn to produce the company’s corn chips. Also, despite the warning from the United States Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) that aflatoxin had been found to be harmful in lab tests, Wilson and Lamont knowing produce a contaminated product that has the potential to be harmful to any individual that eats their contaminated corn chips. Furthermore, Wilson and Lamont knew that once the corn chips were made, it was virtually impossible for any outsider to detect any level of contamination in the company’s corn chips.

From an ethical perspective, Wilson and Lamont are experiencing normative myopia. Although they both understand that producing contaminated corn chips had the potential to harm people, they were motivated by the financial circumstances of their situation to violate