I guess it comes down to costs and benefits. You may remember the Ford Pinto

In case you don't, there was a problem with the Ford Pinto a few years back in that a lot of people were dying in low-speed rear collisions.

The problem was with the fuel tank, and could be fixed by fitting a rubber "bladder" to the fuel tank - easy enough, but thousands of cars had already been shipped and sold.

Ford undertook an analysis exercise to see how much it would cost to recall and fix all the cars sold, and also how much the lawsuits would cost them for all the projected / potential deaths that would occur if they didn't recall the cars.

Result: it was shown that it would be more expensive (in management terms less cost-effective) to recall and fix the cars, so they didn't.

It was clearly ethically wrong from a Kantian perspective, as how can anyone justify putting a value on a human life, but from a purely financial perspective the management could justify it.

Obviously an extreme example but it illustrates the point.

Posted By: Hull Canary on October 19th 2006 at 23:20:57

Message Thread

Reply to Message

In order to add a post to the WotB Message Board you must be a registered WotB user.

If you are not yet registered then please visit the registration page. You should ensure that their browser is setup to accept cookies.

Log in