The Routledge Companion to Business Ethics

p.290

17

The contribution of economics to business ethics

Joseph Heath

To say that the relationship between economics and business ethics has been antagonistic would be to risk enormous understatement. Perhaps the low point was reached in 1978, the year the Ford Motor Company lost the first of two important “Pinto” lawsuits, after having failed to issue a product recall to fix a known problem with the fuel tank in their vehicles that made them likely to explode in the event of a rear-end collision. During the trial it was discovered that the company had decided against a recall, based on the calculation that the cost of effecting the repairs was greater than the value of the anticipated loss of life (Birsch and Fielder 1994). Public outrage reached ...