On the value of human life
We talk about human life as being priceless, and it is. But you can't run a business that way. Any business that offers products or services that are hazardous assigns a price to human life, based on the likelihood that someone will be killed or seriously injured from using these products or services, and then that assigned price is built into what we pay as customers. You can see that if human life is treated as priceless in this context, that value has to be passed on to customers as well, meaning that we can't afford to buy or do anything. The result is that when we buy potentially hazardous products or services, no matter how unlikely death or injury may be, we are entering into an implicit agreement with the sellers on the value of human life. Including our own.
If the sellers are callous and unfeeling because they don't treat human life as priceless in their business models, then so are we, because we don't take that value into account when we decide what we are going to buy. To avoid being hypocrites ourselves, we have to hold companies blameless for assigning finite values to human life. Mother Jones magazine, while writing a fine expose on the Pinto in 1977, is guilty of this hypocrisy. Unless its staff refuses to drive cars or buy insurance.
BUT... there are other possible sins that can be committed by businesses in this relationship:- Assuming that we as customers care only about the best price. Specifically, we saw in the case of the Ford Pinto accidents a version of Lee Iacocca (pictured), the Hero of Chrysler in the late 80s, tell us all that "safety doesn't sell."
Ford Pinto design at the time was constrained by then-Chairman Henry Ford II to no more than 2000 lbf in weight and no more than US $2000 in cost. But we will often make buying decisions for many reasons other than price, and safety surely is one of them. - Making a business case for design features that are known to be unsafe. Products and services sometimes have hazards built-in; that's why we have warning messages. But why would we deliberately design features that are unsafe and then push them through to the market, possibly ensuring that those features are the first things to go wrong?
In the Ford Pinto case, Ford had a better gas-tank design, and decided not to use it for reasons that included an assembly line that already set up for the dangerous design. - Ignoring the customers -- and the media -- when things DO start to go wrong. Ford concentrated instead on the government, lobbying against relevant government safety standards for eight years. While somewhere between 500 and 900 people died needlessly, a number even greater than Ford's estimates of the loss of life they could absorb, Ford fought against the need to recall 1.5 million Pintos.
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posted by Ron @ 6:07 PM
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