Legal and ethical issues conduct of Ford Motor Company ("Ford")

The track Pinto case raised a series of troubling ethical issues. Did hybridizing counselling or its engineers consciously design the Pinto's fuel tank governing body in much(prenominal) a way as to abridge reasonable consumer safety concerns? If it did not do so initially, did it do so after assumeing disrupt tests and before introducing the Pinto on the trade? Was it unethical to utilize a fuel tank transcription design which met minimal legal standards even if it acquaintd profound risks of death and injury to consumers? Did Ford's instruction use a personify/benefit system of analysis in deciding whether to think of Pintos which placed a monetary value on gentleman life and was the use of such an analysis unethical?

Did the Ford circumspection system, its procedures and decision- make process, give insufficient emphasis to ethical considerations and overly much importance to corporate sales and profits? Did Ford employees, such as its product engineers, executives and recall managers, carry pop out their ethical responsibilities or should they have blown the whistle --i.e. asleep(p) public -- with their concerns over unethical corporate conduct in the Pinto case? How ethically did the senior management of Ford conduct itself in regard to the Pinto?

a. Relevant facts. The Pinto was introduced on the market in September 1970. A conscious decision had been made at operating and engineering takes to place the fuel tank female genital organ the rear axle rather than above it. It

was placed only 9" behind a more or less flimsy rear bumper. It appeared that a number of reasons dictated that choice, a desire not to reduce trunk space, which was regarded as an all-important(prenominal) competitive consideration, and to fit within the broad design and toll parameters established by CEO Lee Iacocca, the not to drop dead $2,000, 2,000 lb. rule. For competitive reasons, the normal time which would elapse from the drawing bestride to road tests of 43 months, was shrunk to 25 months. Therefore, when the first routine crashing exam began to reveal that the placement of the fuel tank might pose risks in rear-end collisions, Giola says that "tooling was already well underway (thus 'freezing' the canonical design)." (Dennis A.

Giola, "Pinto Fires and Personal ethical motive: A Script epitome of at sea Opportunities," at 100, in The Ford Pinto Case A adopt in Applied Ethics, Business, and Technology, (Douglas Birsch and backside H. Fielder eds. (1994)). Nevertheless, as John Fielder points out, "from a legal standpoint the Pintos built during that extent [1970-1975 or prior to the adoption to the more rigorous NHTSA criterion 301] appear to have met the existing regulatory standards for fuel safety." ("The Ethics of Automobile Regulation," at 290 in (Birsch & Fielder, supra)).

After the initial crash testing showed the fuel tank was unsafe and further carry showed that a cost effective alternative was available, Ford management clearly had an ethical option to do the right liaison and recall the Pinto long before they did. If a lower level manager such as Giola who was in charge of making recall recommendations could later regret that he had not through "everything I could to get those cars [Pintos] off the road," one wonders why such ethical alternatives were foreclosed at higher levels by the Ford management system. (Giola, supra, 106). The answer was, of course, that they were not, but the necessary moral leadership was lacking.

Steven Kelman, "Cost-Benefit Analysis: An Ethical Concept,
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