Ethics Essay: Ford vs. Pinto

"In 1972, a woman, whom for legal reasons we will call Sandra Gillespie, pulled onto a Minneapolis highway in her new Ford Pinto. Riding with her was a young boy, whom we'll call Robbie Carlton. As she entered a merge lane, Sandra Gillespie's car stalled. Another car rear-ended hers at an impact speed of 28 miles per hour. The Pinto's gas tank ruptured. Vapors from it mixed quickly with the air in the passenger compartment. A spark ignited the mixture and the car exploded in a ball of fire. Sandra died in agony a few hours later in an emergency hospital. Her passenger, 13-year-old Robbie Carlton, is still alive; he has just come home from another futile operation aimed at grafting a new ear and nose from skin on the few unscarred portions of his badly burned body. (This accident is real; the details are from police reports.)"

- Adapted from a case by the Foundation Coalition
[http://www.foundationcoalition.org]

The legal issue here is the heavy responsibility that Ford Motors bears for willingly putting the lives of millions at stake, because there priorities were instead focused on the money that would be lost in recalls. They reasoned that the number of people they would be suing - and receiving monetary compensation for damages - would be far less brutal on the companies' pocketbooks than the recalls. As the discussion topic brings out, the assembly line machinery was already tooled when the engineers found the defect - it would have been harsh monetarily to fix the problem before the car was manufactured, let alone the recalls. However, here in lies the ethical issue: Ford *knew* about the problem *before* manufacturing it. They knew that people would be hurt. An exploding gas tank? - definitely, safety was not a major concern. And did they warn the public of this defect? It was not until *1978* that the issue was announced.

The action was NOT ethical by using utilitarian principles - if that had been the case, then Ford Motors would have used a point system to determine which choice would have yielded the greatest benefit to the most people. The public, obviously, is more people than the number of greedy manufacturers behind the Pinto being developed and sold to the masses without so much as a warning.