Volkswagon Case Study

Essay Assignment #2

Philosophy of Science

        Between 2008 and 2015, Volkswagen cheated on US air pollution tests with their diesel engine cars by purposefully altering performance during testing. When the VW cars are being used for everyday purposes, outputs of emissions are up to 40 times the legal amount. The decision that Volkswagen made that was the root cause of the emissions tampering crisis was to either use pollution-defying technology that would be environmentally friendly but would lower the car’s performance, or to lie to the public by using with the diesel software that would raise their revenue by selling higher-performing cars that the public falsely thinks are environmentally friendly (WatchMojo.com, 2015).

        The cognitive process these videos are meant to stimulate is enactment. Before watching these videos, I thought about the Volkswagen scandal as the fault of the organization as a whole, not as the fault of individual choices that specific people in the company made to alter their environment. Enactment hinges on individualism and understanding. These videos make viewers understand the important environmental factors as well as that the people working for VW made deliberate decisions to cheat the system to create a favorable environment for the company. In the video by CNN, Peter Valdes-Dapena calls the scandal “a deliberate action...it’s almost inconceivable that this software wasn’t created this way on purpose.”

        The meta-theoretical perspective of hermeneutics comes closest to capturing the cognitive process of enactment, as enactment is a form of hermeneutic analysis. Hermeneutics is about the interpretation of intentions and actions, and these videos view VW’s actions as intentional. Hermeneutics is not about explaining causal laws; rather it sees human actions as reasoned by the value that is achieved due to the performance of the act. This is displayed in the videos because they discuss why the people at Volkswagen took the actions that they did and what value they hoped to gain from the lies that they told the public (CNN Money, 2015).

        From the perspective of the Volkswagen engineers that were responsible for the scandal, a rational choice explanation would use a game theory payoff matrix. About a decade ago, VW was competing with Mercedes-Benz to make a low-emissions diesel engine (Zhang, 2015). Both players were pursing market share and revenue by releasing this engine. Their options were to tamper with the software, thus breaking the law, or to not tamper and settle for a lower-performing car. If both companies tampered, they would have medium gains. If both didn’t tamper, their gains would be lower. If Volkswagen tampered while Mercedes did not, Volkswagen’s gains would be very high, while Mercedes’ would be very low. Other car manufacturers, like Ford, have either declined using “defeat devices” or not commented. They are also involved in this payoff matrix with VW, so they may be lying to the public as well (Hotten, 2015).