Design, production & ethical issues

Aluminium cans

Approximately 1 billion are produced in the USA each year. The first can was designed in 1958 by Kaiser Aluminium. This metal proved ideal as it was a lightweight, flexible material that allowed manufacturing of the bottom & sides of the can from a single sheet, leaving the top to be added after the can was filled.

The first cans were opened with a separate opener but this was inconvenient so Ermal Fraze designed a small lever attached to the can which was removed as the can was opened.

The design was workable but after a while it created an ethical dilemma:

 

So in 1976 Daniel F. Cudzik invented a simple, stay-attached opener of the sort familiar today.

As improvements were made in the design & production of aluminium cans, various  ethical problems arose concerning:

a.      Human safety:

b.     Environmental pollution:

c.      Convenience:

d.     Money:

Ethical issues

Ethics is about morality; it involves right and wrong but there are many grey areas.

I don't think that because an issue is  difficult a moral judgement should be avoided.

I trivial matters such as expressing an opinion on your wife's new hat it may be advisable to recourse to white lies, whether as a matter of self-preservation or to avoid  hurting feelings unnecessarily. White lies can be a way of applying a sort of social grease which allows people to rub along together more easily.

On more serious matters. I would also take a clear stand. President Harry S. Truman's decision to drop atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6th and 9th, 1945, could not have been easy, especially as the result was a massive loss of civilian life.Truman would have preferred to avoid this but he saw that a full-scale invasion of the Japanese homeland would have resulted in a loss of life, both Japanese and American, on an even more massive scale. As Commander-in-Chief of the US armed forces he saw it as his duty to minimise US casualties and end the war as quickly as possible.
However difficult, he faced up to the challenge and made a clear decision.