PHIL103: Moral and Political Philosophy

Basic questions in business tend to be quantitative, and money is frequently the bottom line: How many dollars is it worth? What's my salary? What's the company's profit? The basic question of utilitarianism is qualitative: how much happiness and sadness is there? Inevitably, it's going to be difficult when businesses accustomed to bottom-line number decisions are forced to cross over and decide about general happiness. One of the most famous attempts to make the transition easier occurred back in the 1970s.

With gas prices on the rise, American car buyers were looking for smaller, more efficient models than Detroit was manufacturing. Japanese automakers were experts in just those kinds of vehicles and they were seizing market share at an alarming rate. Lee Iaccoca, Ford's president, wanted to rush a car into production to compete. His model was the Pinto. Case facts taken from Manuel Velasquez, Business Ethics, Concepts and Cases, 6th ed.

A gas sipper slated to cost $2,000 (about $12,000 today), Ford rushed the machine through early production and testing. Along the way, unfortunately, they noticed a design problem: the gas tank's positioning in the car's rump left it vulnerable to rear-end collisions. In fact, when the rear-end hit came faster than twenty miles per hour, not only might the tank break, but gasoline could be splattered all the way up to the driver's compartment. Fire, that meant, ignited by sparks or anything else could engulf those inside.

No car is perfectly safe, but this very scary vulnerability raised eyebrows. At Ford, a debate erupted about going ahead with the vehicle. On the legal end, the company stood on solid ground: government regulation at the time only required gas tanks to remain intact at collisions under twenty miles per hour. What about the ethics, though? The question about whether it was right to charge forward was unavoidable because rear-end accidents at speeds greater than twenty miles per hour happen – every day.

The decision was finally made in utilitarian terms. On one side, the company totaled up the dollar cost of redesigning the car's gas tank. They calculated

Added up, that's $137 million total, with the money coming out of Pinto buyers' pockets since the added production costs would get tacked onto the price tag. It's a big number but it's not that much per person: $11 is about $70 today. In this way, the Pinto situation faced by Ford executives is similar to the test cancellation question for the College Board: one option means only a little bit of suffering for specific individuals, but there are a lot of them.

On the other side of the Pinto question – and, again, this resembles the College Board predicament – if the decision is made to go ahead without the fix, there's going to be a lot of suffering but only for a very few people. Ford predicted the damage done to those few people in the following ways:

That's a lot of damage, but how do you measure? How do you compare it with the hike in the price tag? More generally, from a utilitarian perspective, is it better for a lot of people to suffer a little or for a few people to suffer a lot?

Ford answered both questions by directly attaching monetary values to each of the injuries and damages suffered:

The math coming out from this is (180 deaths × $200,000) + (180 injuries × $67,000) + (2,100 burned-out cars × $700) = $49 million. The result here is $137 million worth of suffering for Pinto drivers if the car is redesigned and only $49 million if it goes to the streets as is.

Ford sent the Pinto out. Over the next decade, according to Ford estimates, at least 60 people died in fiery accidents and at least 120 got seriously burned (skin-graft-level burns). No attempt was made to calculate the total number of burned vehicles. Shortly thereafter, the Pinto was phased out. No one has final numbers, but if the first decade is any indication, then the total cost came in under the original $49 million estimate. According to a utilitarian argument, and assuming the premises concerning dollar values are accepted, Ford made the right decision back in 1970.

If every Pinto purchaser had been approached the day after buying the car, told the whole Ford story, and been offered to change their car along with eleven dollars for another one without the gas tank problem, how many would've handed the money over to avoid the long-shot risk? The number might've been very high, but that doesn't sway a utilitarian conclusion. The theory demands that decision makers stubbornly keep their eye on overall happiness no matter how much pain a decision might cause certain individuals.