Ethics and Alcohol in the Twenty-first Century

Abstract

This book has begun to develop a view of the ethics of alcohol that focuses on responsibility and the importance of developing responsibility in all who are involved in the production, sale, consumption and regulation of alcohol, and who deal with the social effects of alcohol consumption. In this final chapter, we will review the arguments, focusing on the need to develop partnerships of responsibility. We will note some good examples of this working together, and conclude that perhaps the most important element in the whole debate is establishing an environment that enables the individual to reflect on their personal responsibility. In all of this, we suggest that the example of the alcohol industry takes the wider ethical debate about the nature of corporate responsibility well beyond the parameters of the past thirty years. Hence, we shall begin this final chapter by setting out the thinking in that wider debate — a debate that applies to any industry.