Business Law, Public Responsibility, and Ethics Commons^™

When Making Money Is More Important Than Saving Lives: Revisiting The Ford Pinto Case, Stuart Strother

Journal of International & Interdisciplinary Business Research

Despite a long tradition of ethics training in business colleges, managers commonly make unethical business decisions. This paper reports a five-year study of ethical decision making of business students (n = 192). In an undergraduate microeconomics course, students were presented with financial data from the infamous Ford Pinto case where defective engineering, coupled with unethical management behavior, resulted in a number of fiery fatalities. Facing the decision to repair the cars or pay the estimated costs of lost wrongful death lawsuits, 56.8% of students chose to pay for the deaths. This paper describes the classroom experiment and uses logistic …