Firestone Tires Deaths

The infamous series of deaths attributed mainly to malfunction of Firestone tires on Ford Explorer vehicles provides a good platform for looking at ethics in the business world. Ethical issues address an individual and organizational moral conduct in many aspects of life. In the business world, it involves answering the question of whether we are acting "in good faith, promptly, fairly and equitably, whenever liability is reasonably clear" (Claims, 2001).

If a business has a conflict of interest between being profitable and being unfair, then it is engaging in an unethical act toward the public. As in the case of Ford and Firestone, the company had apparently disclosed the truths from the public in hope of saving the company's long-built reputation. They were aware of the deaths and injuries caused by its tires (Schneider, 2000b), yet they never brought this to the public's attention. Although the company had attempted to solve their tire problems, their solutions took the form of under-the-table deals with the families of the victims. Their main concern was not to publicize the problem (Gonsalves, 2000; Mokhiber & Weissman, 2000).

Avoiding publicity is just another name for wanting to get away with it. Ford and Firestone put their company's profit over their customers' safety and lives by concealing important information (Schneider, 2000b), but they had an ethical responsibility to inform their customers of the problem and thereby prioritize their custo

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had stacks of complaints, which had simply been stuffed in a drawer" (Claims, 2001). Before the Federal government launched its probe in 2000, Ford and Firestone knew of at least 135 deaths and 130 injuries because they were being sued by the families of the victims. CBS News quoted Alan Kam, who retired after 21 years as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's top lawyer for defects and enforcement issues, on Ford's concealment of "signs of failures that were occurring at an astronomical level, at a figure far beyond any measure I have seen before." Kam continued: They were telling the agency they didn't know what was causing stalling while they were doing extensive studies showing they knew what was causing the stalling (Pattern, 2000). Meanwhile, Ford and Firestone's secrecy agreements sometimes barred all parties, including lawyers who brought the lawsuits, from discussing all aspects of the cases, including what they found out during the investigation (Hush, 2000). Neither company did anything at all to look at the underlying problems. Neither company announced the problem to other consumers. One source speculates that they did the cost-benefit analysis and believed that they could actually save money through

Category: Business - F