The Notion of Caveat Emptor - Thesis Example

While caveat emptor defines the legal relationship between buyer and seller, it does not define the ethical relationship.  As this paper will demonstrate, ethics requires a much greater responsibility on the part of the manufacturer and retailer (see Fieser 1996).

To illustrate that the ethical obligation far exceeds the legal one, we can examine the issue from the perspective of one of the ethic's most famous frameworks: the categorical imperative of Immanuel Kant (2006).  Immanuel Kant's famous categorical imperative follows/is founded upon a claim about the nature of human beings as autonomous agents, capable of determining the means by which to accomplish their tasks and goals, and who are capable of goodwill.  To this extent, humanity is an end in and of itself, in that since human beings are defined by their self-rule and their rationality, and because their knowledge of the goodwill comes from their essential capacity to reason out their own interests, every human is endowed with inherent dignity.  As a consequence, Kant made clear that moral actions are actions that are rational when extended to everyone (rather than limiting them to just one person) and that refuse to treat people as merely means to an end. 

Businesses that manufacture or sell products that may be defective (or worse) at the time of purchase are, in very obvious ways, violating the categorical imperative to treat people as an end in and of themselves rather than as merely a means to an end—the profit gained through the sale.  No doubt this business might object, noting that they do not intend for defective products to be sold, but that given the complexities of manufacturing and distribution, a certain number of defects are going to be introduced into any product line.  But the problem here is not the existence of the occasional defect, no matter how unintentional; rather the problem is the lack of responsibility (Sandel 2009) that these manufacturers have toward products that fail to survive the rigors of manufacturing and distribution. 

The incentive, the obligation, to provide tighter quality assurance (QA) controls over the process disappears.  If we took the logical consequence of this negligence, and the lack of structure incentive to correct it and treated it, as Kant suggests, as if it could be extended to a universal, we would have a consumer disaster, wherein negligence is allowed to compound over and over and the error rate climbs steadily toward 100%.  This produces a logical contradiction: allowing for the exceptional case actually logically confounds the value of that exceptional case when extended to the universal, and it does so while treating consumers as merely means toward the accumulation of short-term profits.

Perhaps, then, caveat emptor should be replaced as the normative legal doctrine by caveat venditor (McPherson v. Buick Motor Co.), or “seller beware,” which would place the onus for defective and dangerous manufacturing on the part of the seller, where it makes more sense anyway.  After all, when it comes to the propensity for damaged goods or defective functions, the retailer knows the manufacturing process and their distribution chain far better than does any consumer, who lacks access to the information necessary to make an informed decision.  As such, it makes only logical and ethical sense to place the legal onus where it belongs.