Question

Suppose you bought your daughter a toy oven. She left it turned on and sitting on her bed while the family went away for the weekend. It shorted out and caused a fire. The family cat was killed and many thousands of dollars of damage was done to the house. The instruction manual for the oven (which miraculously survived the fire) contains several pages of warnings, including specific instructions never to use the oven on a flammable surface and never to leave the oven on for more than two hours. Although your insurance will cover most of the repair to the house, it cannot replace things like the precious photos that burned, nor can it compensate for the resulting stress and emotional strain. Do you think it was unethical for the maker of this toy oven to sell it for children's use, knowing that it was a fire hazard? Should the oven be recalled? Are you justified in suing? Explain how each of the contract, due care, and social costs views would answer these questions. Then give an argument for your own answers.

Answer 1

The given case talks about the ethical context of a product sale in an economy. It states that a toy oven is being sold in a market and was brought to the daughter. Unknowingly she turned it on and went away for a weekend. But soon it caught fire as it could not be turned on for hours together which caused a great deal of damage to the house burning away precious things and causing stress and emotional strain.

                        In the above case, it is also said that the toy manual had mentioned these effects along with the product manual. In this context, we cannot say that the toy product sales is an unethical one. There is every right for a producer to sale a product in the market provided they would ensure that the effects of the same finds a clear mention in the product manual which was done in this case. It was the negligence from the part of the consumer that resulted in the above hazard which could have been avoidable. But there is a notion that products like these have more chances of causing social costs as these are prone to similar hazards since it would be used up more by the children. The due care in the process should be more. Apart from the mentioning in the toy manual, there should be mechanisms like alarm or such systems installed that could prevent such happenings in the initial stages till the consumer becomes familiar with the product. Moreover, the given case cannot be considered as the base for suing the producer since there is also an element of consumer negligence in this case. Thus, we can say that although it has no extreme product defaults in the given case, there is a small amount of ethical production as it has the potential of causing similar hazards which could cause similar events to occur. Thus, proper care must be given to ensure that most of such accident never occur which can be the best ethical solution to the above problem so that the social costs could be reduced.