acks the resources to take the medication through the requisite testing by the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) in order to market the drug within the United States. Preliminary clinical trials indicate that the drug is highly effective as well as inexpensive to produce. The researchers who developed the drug are well-established in their field and have confidence (hope?) that the drug is safe as well as effective. However, FDA trials would require an additional ten years or so and millions of dollars before the drug could be marketed in the United States.
Such restrictions are not required by many countries, particularly developing countries, where the drug could be marketed without the same costly trials. There is the risk, of course, that the drug would bring with it long-term detrimental effects such as blindness, or liver problems, or kidney disease, among other possible side effects. However, the benefit of reducing high blood pressure is a lower death rate which would help families maintain their standard of living, or even increase their standard of living as the main breadwinner (often the father) would remain productive and able to produce income while taking this relatively inexpensive medication.
In addition to the question of whether an untested drug (by American standards) should be marketed in developing nations, there is also the issue of whether revenues from the drug's sales overseas should be used to conduct additional tests with the goal of obtaining FDA approval for sale in the United States.
The Response of Different Worldviews to the Dilemma
The resolution of this dilemma depends on the worldview which one brings to the problem. Different ethical perspectives will have different approaches as to how to resolve the dilemma, or even whether there is an ethical choice to be made.
A naturalist holds that there are no absolutes and thus that there is no single set of ethics which can be universall...