ETHICAL CRASHES: The Ford Pinto Case

    We, at most times, believe that ethics govern the province of business reasoning. Checking it through today’s lens, businesses nowadays claimed that aside from maximising profit, they created an evenly increasing social responsibility that is now embedded in them. Decisions are said to be based on ethical frameworks and continuous and conscious efforts in upholding ethical behaviours from executives down to the rank and file employees, they said, are existing.  Though this may be true, we cannot deny the fact that the conflict on what is economical and ethical is still prevalent for some.

The Ford Pinto, Ford’s 1970s controversial compact car, is a good example. With intense competition with Volkswagen, Ford rushed the production of Ford Pinto earlier than its expected launch regardless of the engineers’ discovery that rear-end collisions would rupture the car’s fuel system. The Pinto was responsible for numerous fatalities in the US alone, as well as with large number of burn injuries. 

Given this and the decision of Ford to pay lawsuits and to lobby against safety standards for eight years instead of replacing Pinto’s parts provided an ever greater gap between economics and ethics, thus also creating animosity on morality. With its performance of cost-benefit analysis, Ford was able to calculate its direct and indirects costs, property damage, and insurance, among other things, and to determine the monetary value of a person’s life and suffering. Thanks to this analysis, Ford executives were able to take out ethics and morality from the equation and delivered an output that was purely business and based on greed. Driven by the financial need to maximise profit and minimise cost, Ford’s Management embarked on a journey towards numbers, taking for granted the most important decision making factors, the customers and their safety.  

In conclusion, the decision of Ford opened a wide window for management morality criticism not just for the company but also for the whole automobile industry as this one involved an evidence of the unethical and immoral viewpoints of executives. By contrast, it was a wake up call.  It was also an opportunity for an ethics check up or even an overhaul because ethics, after all, is not just a makeshift thing.