Imagine business driven by "matters of the heart" as Xiusheng Liu puts it. Not egocentric values, work for work's sake, or action motivated by pure profit. Rather business for the purpose of providing a comfortable living, advancing a passion, or bettering people's lives. It sounds pretty idealistic, but why not?
Ok, so there are many reasons why in practice this would not be feasible – namely the natural greed that some believe is part of human nature – but we're talking about the Hindu viewpoint. "The quality of the subject is of primary importance," Liu says. If this is so, the entailment (as it appears to me) would be that human beings would cease being viewed as commodities. That is, instead of people being a means to an end (profit), they would be the end. One would be free to "cultivate the spirit of offering both the work and its fruits to the Master Worker." Now, I'm not calling upon one to accept Vedantic doctrine, but replace Master Worker with "higher good" or "spiritual fulfillment," and it approves likewise. Why should we desire to be more than what we need to live comfortably? Why should we pursue business ends for egocentric goals rather than idealistic ones? We could all use a little more idealism.
I would like this to be a discussion starter for people to think about some more real-world problems of Spirinomics versus Western business practices. What are the biggest obstacles?
Instead of dissecting the situation where a pharmaceutical company wants to get their drug out on the market in the quickest way possible, so they test on people in Ethiopia, I am going to concentrate on the morality of the action. I do not think it is immoral for companies to test their drugs on subjects. It leads me to think of those cancer patients and in my case a family member, with no hope left, who agrees to test an experimental drug for a company knowing full well that it may not help. However, there are many drugs out there who are in the last phases of testing and are awaiting approval from the FDA that could very well prolong life or contain cancerous cells. These drugs need to start somewhere and if they did not we wouldn't have any of the current medications that we rely on. If the people in Ethiopia are aware that it is an experimental drug, and if they are balding, I do not see how this is immoral. Of course they are not going to test this type of drug on an unhealthy person, but they are going to test it on a person that is losing their hair. The health of the person has nothing to do with this situation and is irrelevant. It is not an experimental cancer drug where they would test the drug on someone who has cancer and is nearing the end of their life. It is simply a drug to help men who are balding. We have no way of telling the side effects of the medication, but I can not imagine anyone signing up for an experimental drug test where a side effect could be death. Therefore I see nothing immoral about a Pharmaceutical company testing their drug on people from Ethiopia who are aware of the situation and agree to become a test subject.
Blog week #13 begins here -- this is a separator post to help you see which posts to focus on.
