Case Analysis High Stakes - 2109 Words

Adrian Garcia Badaracco Paulina Gonzales WCWP 10B: Water Ethics, SS II Date Essay 1D: High-stakes golfing The fact that water is a finite resource is no longer debatable. Multiple global conferences, summits, and forums have stated that it is an essential commodity and a human right (Sohil and Cavil 13). Water should be treated not as an economic good, but rather as a resource as precious as life itself, following from a principle to ensure water equality for all. Water is symbolic of life, and life should never have a price. While it may be difficult to establish concrete regulations, these will have to play a role in the establishment of water as an invaluable good. Despite this, it is abundantly clear that the ethical principal of water†¦show more content†¦Around 20% of the global population does not have access to water suitable for consumption, and with the rising population numbers this problem will only continue to grow (Nappier et al. 47). In his water ethic, Adrian Armstrong proposes that an ethic incorporates a framework to use when â€Å"†¦decide[ing] between two competing goods†¦Ã¢â‚¬  (Armstrong 60). This means that for something to be an ethical choice in the first place, there must be a choice between competing goods. An example of this could be sustainability of water resources in opposition to the immediate needs for a local population’s survival, or the opposition between supplying two different populations that share resources. This allows us to define essential functions of water as those that pose the aforementioned dilemma between two options, both with a favorable outcome for humanity or the environment. This is important to define, because if economics isn’t the factor that determines the distribution and uses of water, there must be some type of ruling (ethical, legal or more likely a combination of both) that allows us to determine what uses we should allow our limited resour ces to be allocated to, and which to not allow. Amongst their ethical principles for water management, Sue Cavil and Muhammad Sohil propose that â€Å"Priority (†¦) should be given to the thirsty† (14), along with the application of equity and sustainability. Equity is a word that has the same Latin