Abstract
All products entail risk whether from design flaws, overuse, or misuse. How safe should a product be? What duties do manufacturers have to warn consumers of potential safety flaws? Mark Dowie’s expose of the Ford Pinto in Mother Jones remains a staple in business ethics classes. However, Dowie’s estimates of potential fatalities and injuries were overstated, but Ford’s estimates were biased, too. The Ford Pinto episode is an example of questionable ethical behavior by producers and journalists.
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Notes
- 1.
In Alfred Hitchcock’s movie, Psycho , the private detective, Arbogast, actually engaged in a statistically likelier deadly activity: ascending stairs. Deaths on stairs greatly outnumber deaths from a knife-wielding, mother-fixated, homicidal maniac.
- 2.
The human capital approach requires calculating the present value (PV) of a person’s lifetime earnings. This has some drawbacks, such as choosing the interest rate to be used for discounting future income? The rate of interest chosen has a large impact on the values calculated. The PV of lifetime earnings usually peaks in the 20s and then falls. By the time people reach 65, the PV (lifetime earnings) is relatively small.
- 3.
If we knew the person’s reservation price—the maximum they’re willing to pay for the airbag—we could tighten our estimate of the value that the person places on their life.
- 4.
Donald Hay disputed the morality of using cost-benefit analysis (Hay [1989] 2004, 141–142).
- 5.
See Peltzman (1975, 677–726) regarding effects of seat belt usage in the 1960s.
- 6.
Then again, GM was simply mimicking the Kennedy administration’s snooping about Martin Luther King’s lifestyle.
- 7.
In fairness, Paul Kearney described his experiences researching electrical hazards in the home; magazines that questioned the safety of electrical appliances found themselves threatened with advertising cancellations—an economic form of censorship. Over time, however, these manufacturers began to find that “safety sells (Kearney 1957, 41).”
- 8.
Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner described Robert McNamara’s efforts to get drivers to buy and to use seat belts; they quoted Henry Ford II as whining, “McNamara is selling safety but Chevrolet is selling cars (Levitt and Dubner 2009, 148–149, 158).”
- 9.
Child seats in automobiles? The author suspects that most Baby Boomers can recall bouncing up and down on backseats of family vehicles or in the back of station wagons.
- 10.
The infamous memo showing Ford’s cost-benefit calculation actually pertained to the problem of fuel leakage in the case of a vehicle rollover, not to rear-end damage (Schwartz 1991, 1020).
- 11.
The Ford estimates may have underestimated the number of deaths, but the available evidence suggests the true fatality count was much closer to Ford’s estimate than Dowie’s interpretation.
- 12.
Note that the disappointing sales helped suppress the number of rear-end fatalities associated with the Pinto; however, even if the estimated 33 or 41 deaths incurred were multiplied by 5.5 (11 million divided by 2 million), the total would still fall far short of Dowie’s estimate.
- 13.
Lee Vinsel’s Moving Violations (2019, 71–101 deals with crashworthiness but does not discuss the Ford Pinto; 129–148 covers the limitations of regulation) describes federal regulation of the automobile industry.
- 14.
Steven Kelman disputed the cost-benefit approach. He believed the approach is too utilitarian and contains technical flaws. He argued that there was a difference in what people are willing to accept “for giving up something to which he has a preexisting right and the price he would pay to gain something to which he enjoys no rights.” Available evidence suggests that most people would insist on being paid far more to assent to a worsening of their situation than they would be willing to pay to improve their situation. James DeLong rebutted Kelman’s arguments (Kelman 1994, 125–131; DeLong 1994, 138–141). This author agrees in the main with DeLong, but DeLong takes a rather snide stance toward Kelman.
- 15.
Was it possible that some buyers were drawn to the allure of driving the “Deadliest Car in America,” as characterized in Dowie’s article in Mother Jones (Dowie 1977, front cover)?
- 16.
The Pinto was a cultural icon in the sense that Charlie’s Angels drove one; the show debuted in September 1976, months before Dowie’s article in Mother Jones.
- 17.
Some readers may object to the courts and argue that something legal may not be ethical.
- 18.
Safety analysts now use dollars per life-year saved.
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Surdam, D.G. (2020). Anxiety Over Product Safety. In: Business Ethics from the 19th Century to Today. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37169-2_9
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