Volkswagen Utilitarian Ethics

Person B: Well, I would say a Rule utilitarian adopts a two part view that stresses the importance of moral rules. According to rule utilitarian , a specific action is morally justified if it conforms to a justified moral rule; and a moral rule is justified if its inclusion into our moral code would create more utility than other possible rules (or no rule at all) (Nathanson, n.d.)

“Every person is to be in subjection to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God” (Romans 13:1). This verse provides the spiritual rule, that when followed, prevents many negative incidents and their consequences. However, the engineers broke this command and made conscious decisions to design, develop, and produce vehicles that violated established law. In fact, the emissions produced were, “…as much as 40 times what is allowed by the U.S. standard defined by the Clean Air Act” (Mercuri & Neumann, 2016, p. 24).

One of the disturbing factors regarding the scandal is knowing that it may have been a joint effort between both the employees & managers in different departments. Part of being in an organization not only entails making ethical decisions, but also holding others to the same standards as well. Unethical decisions caused by a few people or even one person can have a very negative effect on a company’s reputation and their consumer relationships. For example, there were quite a few Engineers and other Executives that were persecuted for their involvement in this incident. According to an article in the New York Times (Vlasic, 2017), “The Engineer, James Liang, is the first company employee sent to prison in the vast scandal that has tainted Volkswagen’s reputation and cost it more than $20 billion in fines and settlements consumers.” Also, according to the New York Times article, Liang’s lawyer stated that “He was not the mastermind, but he did play a role.” This brings up a good point—it shows how any kind of involvement in an illegal/unethical act can put you in bad situation.

Act utilitarianism says that an action is considered morally right when its outcome is the greatest good for the greatest amount of people. It directly produces the greatest overall good. While rule utilitarianism describes how the action which is considered morally right is the one which is covered by a rule. This rule should result in a “favorable balance of good over evil, everyone considered.” Rule utilitarianism focuses on the consequences of generally following a rule, while act utilitarianism focuses on the consequences of individual actions. “Act utilitarianism and rule utilitarianism do not use the same methods to make moral evalutations.”

Rule utilitarianism creates rules that would lead to the general overall happiness of individuals involved and an act is said to be moral when it conforms to those rule. This would mean that an act can be moral in accordance with rule utilitarianism even if the action does not bring about overall happiness, but just because it conformed to a rule that, if the circumstances were different, would have brought about overall happiness.

As a multinational corporation, the implication of the scandal determines the fate of numerous stakeholders both internal and external. Internal stakeholders comprise of the board, managers and employees while external stakeholders subsume shareholders, customers and suppliers. The economic, political and social impacts of the dishonest practices would shape the fate of Volkswagen and affect the future prospects of the automotive industry. Common shareholders whilst not involved in the day to day running of the business placed faith and belief in the firm by providing capital had suffered severe economic loss as share prices (get something for stat). Despite the callous deception in advertising the defeat device displayed no signs of disturbing vehicle performance, however, customers of Volkswagen and its subsidiary vehicles suffer from lower resale value. In addition, even though the scandal was global, European consumers were the most affected with diesel cars accounting for 41% of all European cars (Fontaras, 2016). This high percentage in respect to other nations is a result of incentives provided by the European Union for the purchase of diesel vehicles such as subsidies towards the production process resulting in lower premiums compared to petrol counterparts (Vidal, 2015) In additional with sales falling suppliers of Volkswagen would likely lose future contracts or have current contracts downgraded as less parts are required. Thus, this loss of future

Utilitarianism is the ethical theory that an action’s right or wrong depends on the outcome or consequences of it. Utilitarians believe that the main point of the theory is that “actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce reverse of happiness,” (The Ethical Life, p. 97). They believed that life was better if the amount of happiness and pleasure would be increased but that no one’s happiness was more important than someone else’s. According to act utilitarianism, “an action is morally required just because it does more to improve overall well-being that any other acction you could have done in the circumstances,” (Fundamentals of Ethics, p. 123). In other words, an action is morally good if it creates a large amount of happiness and is wrong if it causes unhappiness. On the other hand, rule utilitarianism is the belief that an action is morally good depending on the correctness of the rules whose goal is to achieve the greatest amount of happiness.

On September 9, 2016, a veteran engineer of Volkswagen AG by the name of James Robert Liang pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy to defraud the government, committing wire fraud, and violating the U.S. Clean Air Act. While working in Germany in 2006, Liang was part of a team charged with producing a new fuel-efficient diesel engine that satisfied new U.S. regulations on vehicle emissions. He and his team eventually came to the conclusion that their engine could not satisfy these new regulations while maintaining consumer expectations of engine performance. Their solution to this dilemma was to implement illegal software (known as a “defeat device”) into newly produced vehicles sold in the U.S. The purpose of this software was to detect any emissions test being performed on a vehicle and alter the results to show cleaner emissions on the onboard computer. Nearly 500,000 vehicles with this defeat device were sold in the U.S.; by 2008, consumers began to experience issues in their vehicles (not knowing it was due to the emission test software), and Liang worked to refine the device even further. The entirety of the scandal eventually came into the public spotlight in 2015 (Guess, 2016, p.1). The subsequent paragraphs of this essay will first discuss Kantian duty ethics and rule utilitarianism, and focus on analyzing the moral implications of Liang’s actions in reference to these moral theories.

I do not purport to condone the recall of Volkswagen Passenger Cars; what they did was wrong; and objectively they deserve a swift and severe punishment. However, the media’s response to ‘dieselgate’ is an excessive overreaction. First of all, we cannot go around adding the gate suffix haphazardly to every transgression and gaucherie. Bob Bernstein and Carl Woodward worked for over a year trying to piece together the Watergate controversy. They risked everything for it: jobs, reputation and even their lives. There should be perspective on this controversy, diesel Volkswagen Passenger Cars having devices designed to cheat emissions tests did not and will not ever result in (arguably) the most powerful person in the world resigning.

Volkswagen engineer James Liang was the first engineer indicted by the U.S. government during the Volkswagen scandal concerning one of the biggest frauds in the automobile industry during the 21st century. James Liang held the title of “leader of Diesel Competence” and had moved from Germany to Ann Arbor, Michigan in order to lead a team whose job was to conduct emissions tests on Volkswagens diesel engines. Unfortunately, Liang and his team were not able to fully engineer a diesel that complied with the new amendments of United States Clean Air Act. Liang’s solution to this dilemma was to install a software into the vehicle’s system that would improve the emissions control

Gesellschaft zur Vorbereitung des Deutschen Volkswagens simply renamed to Volkswagenwerk, or “The People’s Car Company” is a German founded car company originally developed by Hitler. Volkswagen states that their morals include being responsible for people, the economy, society and the environment. These morals are quite contradicting due to the 2015 emission scandal where they have abandoned their values by hindering the economy, society, their consumers and the environment. Volkswagen used a software called defeat device on millions of diesel run cars. The software is able to determine when a car is going through an emissions test, making the vehicle appear more environmentally friendly. Volkswagen was caught when the EPA issued a notice

The people at the West Virginia had tested vehicles as well as the EPA (Patel). Volkswagen chose to include rout programming device to cheat the system to pass the testing laws. Volkswagen as a corporation was basically trying to cut the cost of engines to be built by limiting the NOx emission system that controls how much dirty chemicals that goes into the air (Patel).By the company putting this device in their cars they were trying to cut down the cost that they would have to spend, at the same time Volkswagen cars had better performance. The ethical question would be is it really worth it to CHOSE to overlook the laws to save money on cash (Patel). "We expected better from Volkswagen," said Cynthia Giles, the E.P.A's. colleague manager for the Office of Enforcement and Compliance. She called the automaker's activities "a danger to general health of our

The mistrust between the Volkswagen Company and their customers developed after the scandal associated with the incorrect emission of data and cheating of the system unfolded.  The scandal occurred on the eighteenth of September 2015 when it was found that the company had made a car with a turbo that released emission directly into the real word atmosphere. The allegations were genuine and were proved by the Environment Protection Agency in the United States (EPA) (Hotten, 2016).The chief

The Volkswagen dilemma comprises whether it is ethically permissible to install the defeat device. Several stakeholders, mainly the manager, the costumers including consumers and dealers, the general public and shareholders, will be affected.

Volkswagen is one of the largest automakers in the world and it has a global reputation as a high-quality German auto brand. Social responsibility is included in VW’s corporate culture and it seems that Volkswagen made some advances in Corporate Social Responsibility because the corporation was ranked 11th 2015 in the Global CSR Rep Track 100, which listed companies by reputation (Reputation Institute, 2015).However, the company has been threatened by an emission scandal which broke in September 2015, when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) disclosed that Volkswagen had installed defeat devices on diesel cars which were sold in the US. These devices equipped on VW cars cheated regulators in such a way that it could detect