Ethical Considerations and Unregulated Supplements

 

       

In contemplating the issue of lacking regulation of dietary supplements given the pervasive presence of false, misleading, and contradictory information, it is apparent that as far as gold standards go, IDLife has taken the moral lead in the industry. Given its commitment to providing the highest quality products designed solely with science in mind, as well as its efforts to counteract the mass confusion resulting from an ill-saturated internet, there is no better path IDLife could take. As such, it seems more prudent to evaluate the validity of potential solutions derived from ethical frameworks that could provide insight into resolving the aforementioned issues plaguing the health and fitness industry.

From a teleological/consequentialist standpoint, an ethical framework concerned with the outcomes associated with a given action, the issue of unregulated dietary supplements is complicated -at best. While at first glance a consequences-based approach may seem cut and dry, in that the regulation of the supplement industry would result in a market with more effective, safe, and studied products, regulation (as opponents to the prospect often cite) would substantially reduce the wide array of product availability as well as broaden the lag between product creation and consumption. However, one could counterargue that the latter is in fact one of the primary benefits of regulation, as the numerous products currently on the market only cause confusion for people attempting to correctly guess the right supplement to improve their health. Another issue at hand is that regulation of supplements could, temporarily at least, create an obstacle for safe and effective supplements currently on the market who would have to ensure further research and testing prior to being made re-available. Even so, a temporary gap in the accessibility of a minority group of actually safe and effective supplements in order to assure that unsafe and ineffective supplements are off the market seems to be a reasonable price for consumers to pay. As such, a consequentialist perspective would largely support the notion of increased regulation as the long-term results would be highly beneficial to not just consumers and society, but also to supplement manufacturers who would no longer have the risk of liability for unsafe and untested products.

When it comes to other major ethical frameworks such as deontology or virtue ethics, the issue of regulation becomes far less difficult and more straightforward. With regard to deontology, which is concerned with the duties and obligations in an ethical dilemma, the idealistic notion that supplement manufacturers have a duty and obligation to produce safe, tested, and effective products seems rather commonsensical. Of course, one must consider here that there is a substantial difference between an ethical obligation and a legal one -an issue that is at the heart of this entire blog. Certainly, if one assumes the criteria of an ethical obligation over current legal requirements, it is incontrovertible that from a deontological stance, not only should supplement manufacturers model the efforts of morally superior companies such as IDLife, governmental officials and agencies should work to lessen the gap between the legal floor and an ethical ceiling. Likewise can be said of virtue ethics, which holds that right and wrong are the product of character and therefore morality is in the actor which is reflected by one’s behavior. In application to dietary supplements, where again, one can assume that honesty with regard to supplement safety and effectiveness would be the virtue of relevance, it seems obvious that it would follow that a manufacturer would behave much like IDLife, ensuring that its products are safe, effective, and scientifically researched. Furthermore, the same can be said for governmental officials and agencies charged with safeguarding the public from unsafe and ineffective products. The generally held belief that the FDA acts as a regulatory body ensuring that what the population ingests is safe, in a way, defines its supposed virtue, and so its behavior must reflect as much, and therefore, it must be legally empowered to do so.

As such, in examining the issue of unregulated supplements from the lens of the teleological, deontological, and virtue ethics frameworks, we come to one clear conclusion; one clear solution to the issues created by an unregulated supplement industry. The governmental safeguards (i.e., the FDA) must be legally empowered to perform its obligation to keep the public informed and safe, and until such time as that occurs, supplement manufacturers must take on the ethical responsibility of ensuring that its products are, in fact, safe, effective, and made and marketed with integrity.