Ethical Reflections On China's Current Food Safety Issues

The Chinese ancients had the concept long: Hunger Breeds Discontent, Food SafetyFirst. It is not only a necessary condition for the survival, but also an important foundationfor the development of countries. From the Fuyang tainted milk incident that shocked thenation in2004to today’s fast chicken event, in recent years, incidents about food safetyfrequently outbreak. Although a series of food safety and security measures and relatedlegislation have been introduced and perfected, our current food security situation is stillworrying. With the gradual deepening of the socialist market economy, negative externalitiesresult in market failure is inevitable, political interference also has limitations. In theremediation process for food safety issues, the management is not enough to rely solely on theconstraints of the law and system. Under the premise of a lack of moral means, low moralstandards can not be consciously comply with the relevant laws and institutions. The largenumber of facts and practical experience show that a reasonable system design andimprovement of the legislation does not completely eliminate the inherent defects of themarket mechanism itself. Therefore, the ethics of intervention becomes a necessity.Food safety carries on the respect and protection to life, so food safety is of great moralsignificance. Many food safety incidents happened in recent years reflected the problems ofserious moral anomie in the process of food production and supervision. To strengthen ethicsconstruction is the important line of defense to guarantee food security. Enterprise as the mainbody of the food safety issues, the lack of moral conscience and social responsibility is thekey to food safety issues. And the government as an administrative subject in the followingcode of ethics and fulfill the moral responsibility in the exercise of public power and socialaffairs management, must have a big impact on food safety regulatory. Therefore, from theAngle of ethics, to make the enterprise and the government as the research object of thecurrent food safety crisis in China is very necessary. Ethical issues that exist in our countrycurrent food safety not only include the food enterprises lack of moral conscience and socialresponsibility,as well as food safety regulators lack of professional ethics and moralresponsibility. Only to carry on deep analysis to food companies and government departmentsrespectively existing ethical anomie phenomenon, to further the ethical reasons of food safetyproblems in our country, and put forward some corresponding about ethical countermeasuresto promote China’s food security. People call of conscience food and Chinese society require urgently to accelerate theimprovement of food safety building. Practice has proved that the construction of food safetyneeds the intervention of ethics and the ethics exploration for food safety can promote theimprovement of the food safety supervision mechanism. The moral constraint has anextremely important significance for the construction of food safety. Therefore, food ethicssystem starting from the Chinese food safety practices and learning from domestic andforeign research results and practical experience, constructed with Chinese characteristics andapplied to the solution of food safety issues is extremely important theoretical and practicalsignificance.