Honda-Takata: Another case of the Ford Pinto?

For the past few years, major auto manufacturers such as Honda and Toyota have been facing major recall issues with models that date as far back to 2002. The issue at hand is with an airbag company that is named Takata that is contracted with the automakers to make and supply the airbags for their vehicles. It has just been reported that Honda suspects a fifth death to a driver that may have been killed due to the airbag issue. The airbags have been discovered to release correctly upon impact, however the problem found is that they can also release large pieces of metal into the drivers cabin as well, along with other pieces of matter. Chris Martin, a spokes person for Honda in the article that I read reported that Honda believes there has been 5 deaths as well as 52 injuries due to the malfunction of the Takata airbags. It has been reported yesterday that Honda as well as police are still investigating the death of a 35 year old male who was killed by a minor accident in his Honda Accord that caused the airbags to deploy.

This raises a major ethical dilemma as well as many questions. It has been reported that models as recent as 2010 were also reported to have the same problem and were also called in for recall. Did Honda not know about the issue for the past 8 years? That's hard to believe. This is obviously an ethical dilemma for Honda as the result of a wrong decision is human death and injury. The reported accident and death that is currently under investigation was called in by Honda for recall in 2011. Being that the vehicle was a 2002 model, thats an awful lot of time for a major corporation to detect such a problem. To make it worse, Honda stated themselves that they have no record of that particular vehicle coming in to fix the problem. This is a larger issue when considering that Honda could have potentially saved millions of dollars by ignoring the problem.

This ethical dilemma automatically reminded me of the Pinto scandal. This situation being different in that Ford must have been aware of the issue before the cars even left the factory, Honda has more leverage to protect their side of things as the issue is due to an item of the vehicle that they outsourced and might not have had access to the process. However, the problem may have also resulted from the improper installation of the airbags as well, which would have happened in Honda factories. In the case of the Ford Pinto it has been widely studied and deemed to be that Ford clearly used a utilitarian framework in their decision to pass on the millions of recalls and repairs and basically "deal with" the deaths and lawsuits; a calculated decision that proved they could cut their losses. They put together the cost benefit analysis equation together and unfortunately decided that the profits that they could hold on to were more valuable to THEM then the human lives that would have inevitably been lost. Did Honda do the same thing? That's still open for discussion. Is it a stretch to think so? Definitely not when considering the facts of this dilemma.

One can argue that even as large as company Honda is and despite their international presence, such an issue may be difficult to detect. After all, 5 deaths and 52 injuries is a very minute percentage of the vehicles produced. But even one human life or even one human injury that results from a malfunction raises a very considerable problem, or at least it should.

I don't believe that Honda has dealt with this ethical dilemma correctly, in that case all of the models that had any potential of harming human lives should have been recalled and repaired no matter what the cost to the company, as human life should be deemed as beyond value and profits. Again, everything is still under investigation when it comes to Honda's internal control and operations when it comes to this issue, I just don't think it looks too good from here.

Source: NBC News
URL: http://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/fifth-death-may-be-linked-recalled-air-bags-honda-says-n296421

Deflate Gate

In 2007, the New England Patriots of the National Football League (NFL), were caught red-handed illegally video taping the New York Jet's defensive hand signals in the first game of the season. This later became known as the Spy-Gate scandal. Approximately a week ago, the Patriots were thrown into another ethical dilemma as it was discovered that 11 out of the 12 balls they used for the AFC championship game were deflated beyond the documented rule for the PSI level of the balls. This new ethical accusation is now known nationwide as Deflate Gate.

This incident raises ethical issues for multiple reasons. The first, and the obvious, is creating an uneven playing field against the competition for their own advantage, or more simply, cheating. Another significant reason why this decision raises an ethical issue is the mere fact that this is the second major offense related to cheating within the same organization, with the same coach, GM, and other executives involved in the business operation of the Patriots. When faced with the dilemma Bill Bilichick and Tom Brady (the coach and quarterback, respectively) took the position of claiming that they basically didn't know any better. Bilichick even made a statement in an interview asking about the incident claiming that for the 40 years that he has been employed by the NFL, he has learned more about ball inflation and deflation rules more in the past few days than he has in his time with the association. Tom Brady, as you could imagine was forced to take a similar approach.

When examining the decision with a big picture perspective it gets a bit more disturbing in my opinion. From a business and money consideration this ethical dilemma gets much larger than having a competitive nature and doing anything to win a game even if that entails bending or even breaking the rules. It has been proposed by the NFL that consideration for the punishment to the Patriots to be decided after the team plays in the SuperBowl in two weeks. This raises some questions and perhaps a larger ethical dilemma than the one currently being discussed. One can make the argument that the potential profits that can be made from the Patriots playing in the Bowl are exponentially greater than if the team gets kicked out and replaced by the Indianapolis Colts (the team defeated in Deflate Gate by a score of 45-7). This proposition is not one easily disregarded being that the Patriots Vs. the Seahawks creates a matchup of both #1 seed teams that is sure to attract more viewers and hence more profits. The ethical issue here might be one greater of the League as well as the Patriots.

It is very possible that the ethical framework used by the organization to make such a decision is one of a utilitarian outlook. Being that this view is basically a cost benefit analysis, the Patriots may have calculated the risk of making the decision, concluding that the worst case scenario would still be one of them in the SuperBowl, the largest television broadcast in the United States, and one that comes with major financial gains for the majority of anyone involved in the achievement. Therefore I must deem this decision to be incorrect, unethical, and of an utterly greedy matter.

Troy Aikman, a former NFL QB star that is now a broadcaster for ESPN, made a statement earlier today claiming that Bill Bilichick, Tom Brady, as well as the whole Patriot organization should be punished at a level of "historically severe", after citing former NFL cases and their penalties and their decided consequences. After the analysis of this ethical dilemma, I must agree fully with this proposition.

Source: Business Insider
URL:http://www.businessinsider.com/defaltegate-troy-aikman-punishment-new-england-patriots-2015-1

Police face new ethical dilemma in increasingly digital world

      For this ethical dilemma we are dealing with the issue of how our current police departments can manage the protection of our civilians in the digital world. In the article I read for this news event there was a girl that had reported to police that her friend had overdosed on drugs and that she could not be found. The police department in the area later used the girls "comms data" from her cell phone to locate her. The girl was later found and was not in danger of her life.

     Currently, under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, or RIPA, police are allowed to reach out to communications companies to obtain some the data that can help locate a civilian, however this type of protocol should only be used for "very serious situations". This situation can raise very serious ethical dilemmas because where do we draw the line? What is considered "a serious situation?" People can very easily go too far without regulation of this matter and it can also lead to many disputes over privacy rights. Another example given in the article was the case in which a police department had found out that there were illegal pictures of child abuse that were leaked to over 300,000 IP addresses. The police later obtained those IP addresses and tracked them down to innocent civilian homes as they later found out that the IP addresses were to routers and not individual computers. As you ca imagine, those civilians did file many violation of privacy lawsuits, rightfully so.

      Since this dilemma is very current, the police and the government are still trying to formulate a solution to this issue. For the police to simply say that this is the cost of being protected in the new world of technology and digitization and that these are the issues we are just going to have to deal with would be an incorrect and careless way of solving the issue. If we solely observe the situation of the girl overdosing and in need of help to find her friend, it is hard to say that the police handled the situation incorrectly as it is difficult to deem that particular situation anything less than an emergency. However for future reference, there must be a structure that the heads of authority in these dilemmas can use to guide them into making the correct ethical decision. Surely, an "electronic code of ethics" would make the job more difficult for law enforcement. But this is a difficult dilemma to judge and this code of ethics can answer many questions as well as draw boundaries of exactly how far police should or can go given these scenarios. As also mentioned in the article, "there is likely to be widespread support for the idea of a digital code of ethics. Putting it into words might be more of a challenge."

Source: The Guardian Law blog.
URL:http://www.theguardian.com/law/guardian-law-blog/2015/jan/12/police-ethics-digital-internet-technology