How does something like the Pinto case happen? The Gioia article from the Journal of Business Ethics provides the very personal perspective of someone intimately involved in the decision-making process. Using solid ethical reasoning, analyze Ford's cost-benefit analysis from the perspective of virtue ethics, and make comparisons with analyses from the following other perspectives from the text: ethical relativism, egoism, Kant's moral theory, contractarianism.

Here's the Case:

In the early 1970s, Dennis Gioia, a newly hired recall coordinator at Ford, heard scattered tales that the company's popular new compact, the Pinto, "lit up" when hit in a rear-end collision. But it was only after seeing a crumpled Pinto in Ford's "Chamber of Horrors," where damaged cars were examined for possible flaws, that he wondered whether there was a serious problem. "My revulsion on seeing this incinerated hulk was immediate and profound," he wrote in a 1992 article for the Journal of Business Ethics.

Gioia brought the problem before the recall committee but, lacking evidence of a systemic problem, joined them in voting against a recall. About a year later they got some evidence. During preproduction crash tests, they learned, eight of 11 Pintos had "suffered potentially catastrophic gas tank ruptures" on impact. The fuel tanks of the three other cars had survived only because they'd been shielded from a set of studs that did the puncturing.

For the second time the committee voted, and for a second time it decided not to act. The logic was clear: Conventional wisdom held that small cars were inherently unsafe, and as Ford president Lee Iacocca put it, safety didn't sell. Fixing the problem would probably reduce storage space, already at a premium, and ultimately, the design was legal.

The issue arose a third time in 1977, but now in the pages of Mother Jones magazine. Writer Mark Dowie had acquired a Ford cost-benefit analysis from the early '70s that compared the cost of recalling all Ford cars with rear-mounted fuel tanks (not just Pintos) against the costs of restitution for the families of those injured or killed by the Pinto's flaw. It would be cheaper, by a factor of three to one, to pay off victims and their families than to make an $11 fix in each car.

A public still reeling from the betrayal of Watergate now learned that one of its great corporations, Ford Motor Co., had weighed the lives of consumers against the dollar--and chosen the dollar. Ford discontinued the Pinto in 1980 after a costly recall, but the blow to trust would prove more lasting. Consumer activists would now act as safety watchdogs. And when a California jury awarded a Pinto victim a then unheard-of $125 million (later reduced to $3.5 million) for pain and suffering, it galvanized class-action lawyers everywhere.