When I read the blog post question for this week the first thing I did was go to British Petroleum’s website to see what they were promoting.
However, at the top of BP’s U.S.A. website was a tab about their efforts in the gulf. There were multiple pages where you could still read about how they were cleaning and repairing the mess they made. They still have the pages regarding what actually happened during the spill and how they are still committed to repairing the environment in the gulf area.
Sure, there is nothing on their official homepage, but it seems that they still care quite a bit about what people know about the gulf spill. I mean sure, they don’t have anything on their worldwide page, but I’m sure most people outside of the U.S. don’t even remember it happening so why would they keep it there.
Now, if they were to have taken any reference of the spill off of the U.S. website would that be unethical? That’s a great question.
I would say that removing any information about the oil spill wouldn’t be unethical. I don’t think it is necessarily ethical to remove it, but I don’t think it would be an unethical decision.
Using Mill’s utilitarianism, I think the most people are happy when BP takes it down. If people want to find out how BP handled the situation and what happened, the information is still on the internet to find, and BP gets to remove that negative press from their website. Everyone wins in their own way.
BP hasn’t taken anything off of their U.S. website. They still think that it is in the best interest of their company to continue to push their information to potential investors and customers. However, if they were to change their minds, I do not think it would be unethical.
References
BP U.S. (n.d.). Retrieved March 24, 2016, from http://www.bp.com/en_us/bp-us.html
Andrew Bay 