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Woul Kantian Ethics: Is Volkswagen A Good Thing?

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James Liang, an engineer for the Volkswagen Company, is a very loyal employee that has worked for Volkswagen for over 30 years (Lawrence, Eric). However, is loyalty always considered a good thing? Most people would consider this a positive attribute to have. However, in this case, this man’s greatest attribute of being loyal to his company has become the pitfall of his career. It all started in 1983 when he started working for Volkswagen in Germany (The US Department of Justice). In 2006 the company wanted to build diesel engine vehicles for the US. However, after realizing that this wouldn’t be possible with the strict US emission laws, they decided that their only option was to use a “defeat device” in order to pass the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) inspection and the California Air Resources Board (CARB) inspection so that they could launch their new product (The US Department of Justice). Engineer, James Liang was in charge of creating the software that …show more content…

There is also the utilitarian approach and the egoistic one. The utilitarian would believe that an act is morally right or wrong depending on the consequences that bring as much pleasure or wellbeing than any other act. So, if the Volkswagen never got caught, then they would still be making a lot of money. An act utilitarian would think this is morally right. However, a rule utilitarian believes that we should act to a set of rules that will lead to the best consequences if they were accepted by all of society. In this case a rule utilitarian would think that if everyone lied then that would lead to bad consequences, so lying is wrong. This means to the rule utilitarian, James Liang and the defeat devices used were morally wrong. Especially since this also lead to the consequence of consumers not able to trust products and the health of the public would decrease. An ethical egoist would only care about his/her own

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