But that's just it: it
wasn't cheaper to let the Pinto kill people than it was to fix it. The problem here isn't just greed, it is
shortsighted greed. In the case of this tainted food, the odds of getting caught were probably pretty high, so the risk/reward calculus just isn't there.
That said, there's a difference here: purposely selling food you know is poisonous is plain, ordinary murder. They are intentionally doing something they know or should know could cause deaths. The Pinto, on the other hand, was not purposely designed in a way that Ford knew would cause deaths. They found out later. There was certainly an ethical failure and an economic failure, but the conduct was not criminal. Indeed, in hindsight many years later, as the emotion of the issue fades, the issue actually gets less clear:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Safety_problems
Balancing safety and economics is not inherrently inethical. Indeed, such calculus is a critical part of good engineering.
