Ralph Nader was attacked by the car manufacturers with false allegations about himself and his private life, I don’t reckon that makes him a nut.
When all this emerged it gave the public an unmistakable image of what the car industry was all about.
The car industry quickly adopted and guess what, the main issue Nader raised, car safety, has become good for the car industry because safety sells.
The nuclear industry lied got pinned, lied again , got pinned and this kept repeating itself.Eventually the British industry which had lied so much was pinned over quality control issues and is now in the position of seeing the toilet bowl appearing at a rapid rate. Doesn’t look like good business to me.
Is Erin Brockavitch a nut then?
Good business is about consumer confidence, why are there all these FDA controls?Could it be that the drug industry cannot be trusted?
The drug industry has brought it’s licensing woes on its own head .The legal industry has used the law to prove the negligence of these companies.
The profit motive of drug companies has been so overt that they have, at times, supplied products that were not properly researched. That research may have been distorted or not comprehensive enough.
Had the drug companies adapted as quickly as the car companies did and if they had behaved with integrity earlier then these restrictions would not have to be as severe.
The aviation idustry has a saying - If you think safety is expensive then try crashing.
There was an article in the New York Times last week about drugs that are initially financed by the taxpayer through government grants to public institutions. In many cases, taxpayers get no financial return on the investment, their only benefit being the fact that the drug simply exists to be purchased. As a result, it is often the taxpayer who takes the real risk of potential failure. The drug companies simply step in when the prospects look good and license the discovery. Sounds like corporate welfare to me.
It’s no great revelation that corporations exist to make profits. But the question at the start of the thread is whether or not they are ethical. And I don’t see how its illogical to state that profit making and ethical behavior are, in reality, two completely separate issues. A hit-man does his job TO MAKE A PROFIT, but that doesn’t confer any morality to what he (or she) does.
Not all of them! Some of them stay on as sole proprietorships, some of them form partnerships (some of which have one or more limited partners), some of them form those new Limited Liability Companies you’re always hearing about these days, and some of them even form Massachusetts Business Trusts in states where such organizations aren’t illegal. Heck, a limited partnership can even have its limited-partner interests publically traded, as though they were stock certificates!
Just a friendly reminder that “company” and “business” don’t necessarily mean that someone’s filed articles of incorporation somewhere.
The Triangle Shirtwaist fire, and other examples of egregious safety violations in the name of cost-cutting.
Arms manufacturers worldwide (which reminds me of Shaw’s Major Barbara; gotta read that again sometime).
The Nestle formula case.
This is all off the top of my head.
I’d also strongly recommend this book, Toxic Sludge is Good For You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry by John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton. It details numerous instances where businesses have concealed safety issues from the public (in petrochemicals, pesticides, etcetera) in order to preserve a profit margin.
I could go on if you like.
You were joking when you asked that question, right?
The Ford Pinto was one case where the business did exactly the opposite. They did not intentionally engineer the gasoline-fill-hose mount in such a way that the hose could tear loose from it; this rather obscure defect wasn’t detected by anyone, Ford Motor Company included, until the cars had been on the roads for several years. And when they discovered it, they issued an immediate recall and fixed the dangerous gas-pipe mount for free.
You make it sound like Ford was saying, “We’ll make more money if we make this fuel-fill mount defective! So what if thousands will die a fiery death? Wah ha ha ha ha!”
Pardon my ignorance (I’m away from my reference library at the moment), but I was under the impression that in the case of the Pinto, Ford did a cost-benefit analysis and decided that the cost of any potential lawsuits arising from rear-end impact explosions would be less than the cost of recalling the cars…so they didn’t recall the cars. Which, to my mind, would be a business putting profit over public safety. Now, this account conflicts with yours, tracer, and you certainly seem to know what you’re talking about–anyone care to resolve this? (Or I can look it up, when I get back home.)
That reminds me of something from a book I read just before going to law school. The book was called 29 Reasons Not To Go To Law School.
At the beginning of one chapter, a former law student recalls an exercise from an environmental law class she had taken. She, of course, envisioned environmental law as a way to attack perpetrators of toxic torts and clean up the great outdoors.
The exercise had to do with an aluminum plant that faced a lawsuit for polluting a nearby river. A resident downstream claimed that the pollution had killed her child. In essence, the exercise was a cost-benefit analysis, balancing the potential cost of this and future lawsuits against the cost of changing operations to reduce or eliminate pollution.
Yeah, it goes on. And the medical field is indeed in an awkward position: their business is healing, yet it’s in their best financial interest that the patient be sick as long as possible. It’s not a problem with capitalism, but with medicine. Fortunately, the overwhelming majority of doctors are good moral persons and take their oaths seriously.
Drug companies, however, are another matter…I’m trying to locate a report I once saw concerning a drug company making threats to a researcher who wouldn’t push the company’s latest “product”, but I’m coming up blank. Anyway, they’re companies, and they can be as cold and ruthless as any other company.
Actually, I was just recently reading an article which severely criticized the science and statistics in the Erin Brockovich/PGE case. And it wasn’t by a corporation, but rather by a group of scientists and skeptics who question both the data and the conclusions drawn from it. If I can find it again, I’ll post a link.
Safety cost-benefit studies are a proper and moral requirement of doing business, EVEN IF the equation comes down on the side of cost. We simply cannot afford all the safety that is possible from an engineering standpoint. Cars would all be safer if they had 5-point harnesses and full roll cages, but they don’t because someone did a cost-benefit analysis and decided that if they had 5-point harnesses in their cars sales would suffer dramatically.
Somewhere between the extremes of 5-point harnesses and full roll cages, and faulty fuel filler caps, there comes a dividing line at which the company should say, “We won’t enact this safety feature because it costs too much, even though statistically it may cause 20 deaths.”
A company that fails to do these analyses is simply negligent, both to the public and its shareholders. But in today’s legal climate, woe is the company that gets sued and has one of these ethical and proper studies surface, because they’ll lose billions in punitive damages. This is a simple case of the ignorance of the courts and the masses punishing technical people for actions which were correct.
People that jump up and down and say, “No death is worth any amount of profits” are simply airheaded idiots who can’t think. Every human endeavour involves risk. When we build a highrise, safety engineers can say with some accuracy, “X number of people will die on this project”. They do what they can to reasonably keep that number as low as possible, but they still know that one new building = X number of dead people. But the building goes up anyway, as it should.
Sorry for coming in late, but I’ve been workiong a lot of hours.
Hypothetically, what if the owners of an airline discovered that people could fly just by thinking happy thoughts? Would it be evil for them to suppress this information and continue to charge their outrageous prices for airplane tickets?
I love hypothetical situations that make the world so much simpler.
The majority of research scientists in the pharmaceutical industry are good people. They are in this business rather than, say, petrochemicals because they really want to make people feel better. IF any of them discovered something along the lines of “Oak Bark Cures AIDS” it would be written up in the journals faster than you could say “Jack Robinson”.
If they were fired by their heartless corporate masters, I am sure the general public would make the government give them a decent stipend. I doubt they would be fired; a cheap cure for something nasty (as long as the margin was maintained) would make major profits for the stockholders. And the marketing weasels could earn their pay by convincing the general public (who are much less pricey to persuade than doctors) that the Original And Best Oakirol was the only one worth using.
To CASDAVE: Ralph Nader is a lawyer, who never took an engineering course in his life. He assailed the CORVAIR as being unsafe-yet it was designed to be better than any car (foreign or domestic) in the year it came out. Actually, he did not attack just the Corvair-he dug up some poorly-conducted research (from Sweden) relating to the VW beetle-which proported to show a huge problem with the VW catching fire in accidents-this was later shown to be utter BS. The quality of the “research” (if one can dignify it with the name) conducted by Nader and his front organization is uniformly poor, and biased in favor of his positions. If you delve into his history , you find some curious things-he lives in a house owned by his sister 9so he has no assests to be attached in case of a damage lawsuit), and he takes NO salary from his organization-just a MASSIVE expense account. So the bum is a parasite-he pays virtually no income taxes, and is effectively shielded from all actions of tort! He is free to attack just about anyone he chooses-and no one can get back at him!
Seems like an abuse of the system!
According to http://www.uoguelph.ca/~sharoon/a1/a1disate.htm, this is indeed the case. Ford did apparently do pre-production crash testing with the Pinto, and the tube leading to the gas tank tore loose from the tank in every rear-end test impact above 25 miles per hour.
And according to http://www.me.utexas.edu/~me179/topics/lessons/case3.html, Ford had a second Pinto lawsuit and an indictment for reckless homicide pending before they issued the recall notice – and in its reckless homicide case, Ford still claimed it issued its recall notice due to the Pinto’s reputation, not due to a “real” design flaw.
Incidentally, I’ve heard a similar claim made about the DC-10 design – but the claim was made by a Lockheed enthusiast, so he may have just been repeating a rumor he liked.
I’m not going to pretend I heard you volunteering for anything, Sam, and I’m not really an airheaded idiot who can’t think, but, just out of curiosity:
So how much in profits would your own death be worth?
“If this saves even ONE life, it’s worth any cost.”
“If even ONE person dies as a result of this, it’s too dangerous.”
Sentiments like this ARE stupid, no matter how noble they may sound. What’s more, all of us KNOW these sentiments are ridiculous, and we prove it through our everyday actions.
Do you wear a helmet when you drive to work every day? You don’t? Why the heck not? Don’t you know that head injuries are the leading cause of death in auto accidents? How on earth can you be so irresponsible, then, as to drive a car without wearing a helmet?
I’ll tell you EXACTLY why: because you’ve sized up the odds of being in a car wreck, and decided the odds are remote enough that it just isn’t worth the time, money and trouble it would take to buy and wear a helmet in your car. You see? There IS a point at which you’re willing to say, “Even if this makes me a bit safer, it just isn’t worth it.” Are you surprised, then, that businesses make similar calculations? That businesses are willing to say, “There’s a 1 in a billion chance of such-and-such happening. We could eliminate that risk entirely by spending 500 million bucks on thingamajig. Frankly, it just isn’t worth the cost.”
Don’t forget, kaylasdad99, that in 1956 the Ford Motor Company, without any coercion from lawsuits or new laws, came out with a small line of cars engineered specifically for improved safety. They had a deep-dish steering wheel that would absorb some of the impact from a torso hitting it (conventional steering wheels routinely impaled a crash victim on the steering column), and a radical new device called a “seat belt”. The car cost a little more, but Ford thought people would be willing to pay a tiny incremental price increase for a safer ride.
The result? Would-be customers said the seat belts looked “ominous”. Even if the seat belts were removed, potential customers would likewise turn away if told the padded dashboard and visors were there for safety reasons; salesmen eventually started telling buyers the padding was “stylish” in order to keep their attention. The car did not sell well at all. Ford did not start engineering their cars for safety again until after Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed brought the subject to national attention.
If Ford had continued to increase the production cost of their cars by engineering them for greater safety, out of some altruistic desire to “save lives”, everybody would have switched to buying their competitors’ less-safe-but-cheaper cars, Ford would go bankrupt, and no one would end up with safer cars.
Now, suppose instead that every car company decides to make their cars super-safe “for the customer’s own good”, or that sweeping new laws get passed calling for cars that will never ever kill any of their occupants in an accident. Either situation will substantially increase the cost of buying a car. A family that has to save up more money to buy a car will probably put off doing anything that would increase their cost of living – such as having a child, or having more children if they already have a child.
Overall, thousands, maybe tens or even hundreds of thousands, of would-be children will never be born. All because you wanted to save 20-30 people by making their cars safer. Shame on you.
Jeez, you make a smart-ass comment around here, and all of a sudden you’ve got right-wingers jumpin’down your throat, and Olympic-level wise guys tryin’ to make you feel guilty.
What, you have to be a right-winger to realize that some safety features are too expensive?
I wouldn’t have thought this point was even debatable.
One of the biggest causes of non-motorvehicle accidental death in the U.S. is falling from a height. We could save a lot of lives if we demanded that all houses have 4’ netting stretched around the roof to catch people. We don’t, because the number of lives saved is not worth the cost.
So if Ford does a study which says that making X modification was not worth the lives it would save, why do we all assume that Ford MUST be guilty? Perhaps they are simply right.
Actually, if you really wanted to save lives, the number one killer in America is heart disease. Outlaw all foods that are more than 10% saturated fat.
