Santa Clara University Business Ethicist Available to Discuss Toyota
SANTA CLARA, Calif.--Business ethicist Kirk O. Hanson, executive director of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, is available to comment on the Toyota recalls from the point of view of corporate ethical responsibility. Hanson has written about several previous recalls including Bridgestone Firestone Tires and Odwalla apple juice.
Hanson offers the following observations on Toyota’s recall:
- How bad does a problem have to be before a company takes action? If lives are at stake, that places an extra level of ethical responsibility on the company.
- A company ought to have the best possible system for tracking problems with its products or services. The fact that insurance companies and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration had information that Toyota did not have is troubling.
- With automobiles, there’s a fairly constant level of accidents and injuries. Any peak that rises above that normal pattern should trigger research to find out why these problems are occurring. Toyota appears to have done this research, but when they did not come up with an answer, they assumed the problem was with the drivers.
- Toyota’s response so far is bad from both a business and an ethical standpoint. In product recalls, good ethics is almost always good business. Toyota has done great damage to its brand.
About Santa Clara University
Santa Clara University, a comprehensive Jesuit, Catholic university located 40 miles south of San Francisco in California’s Silicon Valley, offers its more than 8,800 students rigorous undergraduate curricula in arts and sciences, business, theology, and engineering, plus master’s and law degrees and engineering Ph.D.s. Distinguished nationally by one of the highest graduation rates among all U.S. master’s universities, California’s oldest operating higher-education institution demonstrates faith-inspired values of ethics and social justice. For more information, see www.scu.edu.