Ethics Assignment
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Ethics Assignment
The Ford Motor Company had a choice to make concerning the release of their new car model, named the Pinto, into the market. They decided to not modify the fuel tank which would, in effect, lead the serious injury and/or deaths of a substantially large amount of people. Some questionable thoughts that this brings about is if their action was justifiable, what I would have done if I were the one responsible of making the decision, and how auto manufacturers make big decisions like this at this day in age.
Fords decision making was not justifiable. They decided that the cost of settling the expected cases of death and injury economically outweighed the cost of making the modifications to the car that could prevent the deaths and injuries all together. This involved assigning a value to human life that they compared with the value of money.
If I were responsible of making the decision, I would have decided to modify the fuel tanks. I would justify this decision with the Egoism approach, which looks at companys self-interest in the long-run. The Ford Motor Company only looked at how they would benefit in the short-run and failed to recognize the harms that would arise from their decision in the long-run. Examples include the years of negative publicity and media the company gained, along with the value and relationships that customers and bystanders lost for the company. This would, in turn, lead a decrease in profits. Another approach, personal virtue, could have been used to help push Ford toward making this decision. The people who made this decision are the people who are internal users of the business, rather than external users. The external users are the people who the internal users want to build profitable relationships with and they, therefore, have different wants. When someone gets hurt from a Ford product, people outside of the company who hear about it through the media probably feel very sad and sorry for the person. The people who were in charge of making choices for the company should have taken into account how they would have felt if they were an outsider hearing about a death from a product.
Today, auto manufacturers can make decisions like this by taking their mission statement into account to help decide what their customers would expect. Then, they can identify the primary and secondary stakeholders and how each group will be affected by each choice. Finally, they choose the best option.
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