my
understanding of the whole thing is that the popular revulsion to Ford in the
Pinto case was basically Kantian; they didn't consider the people's deaths as a
"cost" in themselves, but only in as much as some proportion of the deaths would
probably give rise to lawsuits which would affect Ford's profits. This is
of course a class-tilted way of looking at the costs; presumably there was an
implicit assumption that since the Pinto was a cheap car, most of the deaths
would be of poor people who'd be less likely to sue. But I think that the
really revolting thing which caught the popular imagination was the idea that
the only way that Ford looked at deaths of its customers was as a potential
legal liability to Ford.
dd
Actually the Pinto case raises a very deep and extremely hard issue. What exactly whas it that Ford did that seems to terribly wrong? I don't dispute the idea that Ford did something bad, but what was it?
