Can utilitarianism provide a moral justification for engineers who work for tobacco companies, for example, in designing cigarette-making machinery?

In your answer take account of the following facts (and others you may be aware of) Cigarettes kill more than 400,000 Americans each year, which is more than the combined deaths caused by alcohol and drug abuse, car accidents, homicide, suicide, and AIDS.

Cigarette companies do much good by providing jobs (Philip Morris employs more than 150,000 people worldwide), through taxes (over $4 billion paid by Philip Morris in a typical year), and through philanthropy. Most new users of cigarettes in the United States are teenagers (under 18).

There is disagreement over just how addictive cigarettes are, but adults have some choice in deciding whether to continue using cigarettes, and they may choose to continue using for reasons beyond the addictive potential of nicotine.\\r\\n

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According to Utilitarianism ethics the claim of an action to be right depends upon its consequence I... View the full answer