66. “Manufacturers are responsible for ensuring that their products are safe. If a product injures someone, for whatever reason, the manufacturer should be held legally and financially accountable for the injury.”
Discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the opinion expressed above. Support your point of view with reasons and/or examples from your own experience, observations, or reading.
“制造商对保证他们的产品的安全负责。如果一个产品伤害了某人，不论什么原因，制造商都应该对伤害负法律和经济责任。”
1.         Manufactures are resposible for providing the consumers with safe and reliable products and they are also responsible for supplying clear and detailed instrctions. That is the basic requirement for a qualified manufacture.
2.         To satisfy the need of the consumers for convenient and user-friendly product will benefit the manufacture at the same time. Because during the process in pursue of the consumers' satisfaction the manufactures have to make innovations and a lot of P&D, which will enhance the manufactures and make them competetive in the rival with others.
3.         However, if the manufacture has already done well to provide excellent and safe product plus clear and detailed instructions and it is the consumers' misconduct that should be blamed for the incidence, then the manufacture is not responsible for the injury.
 
View1: safe is one of the most important features of products
View2: the extremely strict standard of safe liability is costly and unfair to the manufacturers.
Evidence: this standard force manufactures to do excessive safety testing, and defending liability law suits, Consumers are then damaged by ultimately bearing these costs in the form of higher prices.
nothing can be absolutely safe if used inappropriately. while manufacturers have given clear guide on how to keep and use their product, it is still impossible for manufactures to ensure their products being under proper use. More over, a large number of victims are not direct customers but second-hand users, who can not receive all instructions and guidance.
 
In determining whether manufacturers should be accountable for all injuries resulting from the use of their products, one must weigh the interests of consumers against those of manufacturers. On balance, holding manufacturers strictly liable for such injuries is unjustifiable.
Admittedly, protecting consumers from defective and dangerous products is an important and worthwhile goal. No doubt nearly all of us would agree that health and safety should rank highly as an objective of public policy. Also, compelling a high level of safety forces manufacturers to become more innovative in design, use of materials, and so forth. Consumers and manufacturers alike benefit, of course, from innovation.
However, the arguments against a strict-liability standard are more compelling. First, the standard is costly. It forces manufacturers to incur undue expenses for overbuilding, excessive safety testing, and defending liability law suits. Consumers are then damaged by ultimately bearing these costs in the form of higher prices. Second, the standard can be unfair. It can assign fault to the wrong party; where a product is distributed through a wholesaler and/or retailer, one of these parties may have actually caused, or at least contributed to, the injury. The standard can also misplace fault where the injured party is not the original consumer. Manufacturers cannot ensure that second-hand users receive safe products or adequate instructions and warnings. Finally, where the injured consumer uses the product for a purpose or in a manner other than the intended one, or where there were patent dangers that the user should have been aware of, it seems the user, not the manufacturer, should assume the risk of injury.
In sum, despite compelling interests in consumer safety and product innovation, holding manufacturers accountable for all injuries caused by their products is unjustifiably costly to society and unfair to manufacturers.