Ethics

Introduction and Factual Background
Manufacturers of products certainly know through experience that some people who purchase their goods will be injured or die as a result of using these products.  Infants will die from the use of toys purchased by their parents.  These deaths, extraordinarily tragic are inevitable and they may be caused by an improper use of the product or by some design flaw that renders the product dangerous in some particular way.  In terms of an ethical approach to these types of injuries and deaths, particularly in terms of determining how responsibility ought to be assigned, there must be an underlying assessment of culpability.  More specifically, responsibility should at the very least be assigned to those who consciously place dangerous products in public circulation in addition, a strong case can be made that responsibility should be assigned, and culpability affirmed, even in those cases where a less-than-deliberate distribution of dangerous products leads to deaths.  This applies to corporations no less than individuals.  Indeed, because a corporation is nothing more than a legal type of person, corporations should not be immune from responsibility for manufacturing or distributing dangerous products knowingly or negligently.

The Ford Pinto case is an excellent illustration of the type of situation in which responsibility should be assigned to individuals and a corporation because of the placement of an unusually dangerous product into the hands of unsuspecting consumers.  In the instant case, it is well-established that Ford designed, manufactured, and distributed this new subcompact model in order to respond to increasing market competition in this automobile niche.  Problems arose, however, because In pre-launch tests, Ford discovered that rear end collisions propelled the gas tank onto the real axle, which had protrusions that ruptured the tank and caused the car to catch fire (The Pinto Case 1). Fords management was aware of this problem, considered whether a redesign was desirable, and ultimately decided to continue production without any design changes.  The available statistics provide that Fewer than 30 people died in Pinto accidents during the cars 2-million production run (The Pinto Case 2).  Statistically, therefore, .000015 of the people who purchased or were passengers in a Ford Pinto actually died as a result of the rear-end explosions caused by the aforementioned problem discovered in the pre-launch tests.  Ford was eventually indicted for one wrongful death and was acquitted in a trial because a jury made the factual determination that Ford was not indifferent the particular dangers caused by the Pinto design flaws.  In a civil context, on the other hand, a jury did find Ford culpable and awarded substantial damages.  Indeed, as it has been noted in the academic literature, this Ford Pinto case created new ethical and legal debates about how criminal and civil responsibility should be assigned in product liability legal cases more particularly, it has been noted that The future significance of the Pinto trial lay in the fact that it established a precedent for the criminal prosecution of the manufacturer in a product liability case HYPERLINK httpwww.questia.comPM.qstaod107064984(Berger 345) in addition to well-established types of civil liability.  As a result, the Ford Pinto case implicates whether criminal liability ought to be assigned as well as whether civil liability ought to be assigned.

Assigning Civil and Criminal Responsibility An Ethical Perspective
As an initial matter, in terms of an ethical approach to the Ford Pinto case, it is first necessary to acknowledge that issues relating to causation and culpability are much more complicated that it might at first appear.  A simplistic type of ethical analysis, as can be seen in popular media coverage f the Ford Pinto case, tends to reduce the ethical calculus to two main parties.  This type of analysis looks relies on characterizations of a large and greedy corporate organization and characterizations of innocent consumers who have had important information deliberately hidden from them.  What emerges is a corporation versus consumer framework, in terms of determining responsibility, that ignores other possible causes and contributing factors.  It is true that Ford discovered and knew about the design flaw.  It is true that Ford knew, to some extant, that this flaw could lead to rear-end explosions in certain types of automobile accidents.  All cars, however, can explode and catch fire in ways that will lead to injuries or deaths.  The consumer is also a driver and drivers must use cars safely and responsibly if they are to avoid injury or death.  A review of the commentary reveals a great deal of factual information about designs, discussions, and lawsuits what is lacking, on the other hand, is a carefully documented description of the driving behaviors which led to the accidents which subsequently triggered the rear-end explosions.  The cause or the causes of the respective accidents, consequently, intervene between the Ford decision to manufacture and distribute the cars and the ultimate explosions and deaths.  If a driver is driving unsafely or if the weather is particularly rainy or icy then Fords culpability might be of a lesser degree.  One must also consider the fact that these accidents were caused by rear-end collisions, meaning that drivers of other cars were recklessly or negligently following too closely behind the Ford Pintos.  Causation, and its use in assigning responsibility, is therefore a more complicated set of questions than might appear at first glance.  Ford should be held responsible if it truly knew that it could have reduced injuries and deaths by fixing the design flaw whereas responsibility should be assigned to other causes Ford did not think that a redesign would improve driver and passenger safety.

The facts underlying the Ford Pinto case strongly suggest that Ford should be responsible civilly and that executives who ultimately approved the production process despite the design flaw should be held criminally responsible as well.  Ford has a special expertise in the design and the production of automobiles.  It is therefore best situated in terms of knowledge and production to ensure the safest type of car possible given available technological means at the time.  Consumers trust the fact that Ford is allegedly producing safe cars, they rely on this trust when making purchases, and this trust includes both ethical and legal components.  This case does not involve a general type of accident in which an injury or a death occurs quite the contrary, this case involves a very specific type of design flaw with very predictable consequences.  It is this awareness of particularized types of flaws and risks that distinguishes the Pinto case from more general types of automobile accidents.  Contrary to the jury determination in the criminal case against Ford, to the effect that Ford was not indifferent, all of the available evidence suggests that the top management was indifferent and this indifference directly led to the resulting injuries and deaths.  Had these people dies from accidents caused by some unknown cause then Ford would have a much stronger argument.  Such is not the case.  The foreknowledge in the instant case justifies assigning civil liability to Ford and criminal liability to the elite decision-makers.

Rationale for Assigning Responsibility  Amoral Calculation Approach
The most persuasive rationale for assigning criminal and civil responsibility in the Ford Pinto case is rooted in the documented fact that Ford engaged in a cost-benefit analysis in order to decide whether or not to fix the design flaw.  This was a straight forward type of financial cost-benefit analysis in which Ford weighed the costs associated with future deaths against the costs associated with fixing the design flaw.  Specifically, Ford applied a generic costbenefit analysis to accidents based on National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates of the worth of a human life  around 200,00 based on productivity estimates at that time  and its own figures on deaths from car accidents (The Pinto Case 1).  Based primarily on this type of cost-benefit analysis, Ford stated that it made the decision to go ahead with production despite the obvious design flaw and the associated risks.  From an ethical point of view, assuming that Ford is best positioned to ensure safety and that injuries and deaths are to be prevented to the extant possible, then Ford failed to ensure consumer safety.  How much, for example, is a human life worth  This type of valuation might be easy to quantify economically, as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates demonstrate.  Ethically, however, assigning a numerical value to a human life within the context of a profit-seeking venture is highly problematic.  It is problematic because the value of a human life thereby becomes diminished to the extant that it can be characterized as a cost of doing business rather than as an independent consideration demanding heightened respect and treatment.  This type of merging of human life and organizational objectives, in terms of characterizing a human life in terms of risk or monetary value, has been discussed in the academic literature and the ethical issues related to the treatment of human life have been debated.  It has been noted, for example, that incorporating and merging the value of human beings into organizational calculations represents a type of amoral calculation more specifically, it has been argued that  The Ford Pinto case study, often cited to support amoral calculation, also suggests that an internal normative environment developed where deviance became normalized within the organization HYPERLINK httpwww.questia.comPM.qstaod5037660081(Vaughan 29).  This organizational deviance is the failure to view the value of human life as an independent ethical concern rather than as an interdependent business factor that can be quantified.

In the final analysis, it is the nature of the decision-making process in the Ford Pinto case that justifies an assignment of civil and criminal responsibility because greater efforts could have been made by the experts to safeguard human lives simply by fixing the design flaw.  These conclusions are premised on the particular facts of the Ford Pinto case, but the notion of amoral business or organizational calculations is a worthy framework for ethically assessing these types of scenarios.