th and injury to consumers? Did Ford's management use a cost/benefit system of analysis in deciding whether to recall Pintos which placed a monetary value on human life and was the use of such an analysis unethical?
Did the Ford management system, its procedures and decision-making process, give insufficient emphasis to ethical considerations and too much importance to corporate sales and profits? Did Ford employees, such as its product engineers, executives and recall managers, carry out their ethical responsibilities or should they have blown the whistle --i.e. gone 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 levels to place the fuel tank behind the rear axle rather than above it. It was placed only 9" behind a fairly 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 important competitive consideration, and to fit within the broad design and cost parameters established by CEO Lee Iacocca, the not to exceed $2,000, 2,000 lb. rule. For competitive reasons, the normal time which would elapse from the drawing board to road tests of 43 months, was shrunk to 25 months. Therefore, when the first routine crashing testing 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 basic design)." (Dennis A. Giola, "Pinto Fires and Personal Ethics: A Script Analysis of Missed Opportunities," at 100, in The Ford Pinto Case A Study in Applied Ethics, Business, and Technology, (Douglas Birsch and John H. Fielder eds. (1994)). Nevertheless, as John Fielder points out, "from a legal standp...