A Philosophical Approach:the Pinto Fires Case

The Ford Pinto Fires Case

In the 1970’s Ford Motor Company released the Pinto, a new compact car that was more financially attainable than their other models. Unfortunately, the car was released to the public earlier than their models typically were in order to compete with foreign markets. With this escalated release with was “the shortest production planning period in automotive history”, came a serious design flaw (Treviño & Nelson, 2011). A defect in the gas tank design led to several deaths.

Background

The flaw with the gas tank design was discovered during crash testing the vehicles. Although it was noticed, it was not corrected at that time. Being that the entire process was being done quicker than normal, the production was too far along. It was determined that it was too costly at that point to redesign them. “Ford had [even] experimented with placing the gas tank in different locations, but all alternatives reduced usable trunk space” (Treviño & Nelson, 2011). This was deemed more important than safety at the time. Even though this was a real potential safety issue, the cars technically still met the safety standards.

Reports trickled in over the next few years of actually people being burned alive because the cars would explode in rear end collisions, even those at speeds low enough to be considered a fender bender. “Between 1971 and 1978, the Pinto was responsible for a number of fire-related deaths. Ford puts the figure at 23; its critics say the figure is closer to 500” (Barry, 1979). It wasn’t until after many deaths, pending lawsuits, and negative media attention that Ford decided to recall the vehicles with the defect.

Ethical Issue

The ethical issue in this case is clear. The problem is that Ford defined human life by a number. It put a blanket value on any given life. They used that value to calculate whether or not it would be cost effective to fix the known defect or leave it as is. It was bad enough that the issue was known to be possible and it was not fixed. It was even worse when actual people actually died and still nothing was done. When lives have been lost and more lives are on the line one wonders why nothing was done. “The evidence suggests that Ford relied, at least in part, on cost-benefit reasoning, which is an analysis in monetary terms of the expected costs and benefits of doing something” (Barry, 1979). That analysis deemed that the cost of the repairs outweighed the cost of the lives lost.

This decision is mostly in line with a consequentialist approach. If you look at it from a deontological perspective, the decision made did not show respect for human beings. If you look at it from the perspective of virtue ethics, integrity did not go into this decision. If intentions are the key factor, the only intention here