A Failure in Ethics

As I wrote last week, there are many times when an ethical issue will come up in your business life. In class this week we further discussed moments in time when ethical issues were acknowledged and not handled ethically. After discussing this, I decided to look further into it and find a time in recent years when someones life might have been put in danger because of someones unethical decision. It just so happened that while I was studying for a Law 322 test, I found a case in which Guidant Corporation didn't recall a heart defibrillator and put thousands of lives at risk. The malfunction in the device was discovered in 2002 but was not recalled until nearly 3 years later. The company's excuse for not recalling sooner was that the risk of removing the device was greater than the risk of malfunction. Not only did they wait 3 years to inform individuals of the malfunction, Guidant admitted to not believing the "modified" version from 2002 actually fixed the problem. This simply blew my mind, I do not understand how a company can knowingly harm innocent people because they think some risks outweigh other risks. The least they could have done was offer the knowledge to doctors and patients that it affected and allow them to make their own decision. The malfunctioning device resulted in at least 7 deaths. This may not seem important to many people, however I do believe the families that lost someone would greatly disagree.