Case: Fire Detectors

Fire Detectors

Residential fires cause many deaths each year. Several companies manufacture fire detectors in a highly competitive market. Jim is a senior engineer at one of these companies. He has been invited to discuss with management the directions his company should take in manufacturing and marketing fire detectors.

Jim knows that there are two basic types of fire detectors. Type A is very good for certain types of fires, but for smoldering fires the detector will delay the alarm too long or fail to detect the fire at all, sometimes resulting in the loss of life. Most companies still manufacture type A because it is cheap to build and generally performs well. Type a sells for $6 to $15.

Type B detectors combine Type A fire detecting abilities with a device for detecting smoldering fires, which constitute about 5 percent of all fires. Type B detectors sell for $15-30, but they could be sold for almost the price of type a detectors if they were manufactured in large quantities. In order to bring this about (short of government intervention prohibiting the sale of Type A detectors), many companies would have to decide that, in the interest of greater public safety, they will sell only Type B fire detectors.

There is little evidence that this is going to happen. As things stand, most companies either manufacture only Type A detectors, or at lest depend on Type A detectors for the vast majority of their profit. Relatively few Type B detectors will sell under present market conditions. However, we do not know for sure what the actual effect of a company’s example of selling only type B detectors would be. It might stimulate other firms to follow the example, or it might cause the government to outlaw Type A detectors.

Jim’s company could still stay in business if it manufactured only Type B detectors, because there is some market for them and fire detectors are only one of the products manufactured by Jim’s company. Jim takes seriously the engineer’s responsibility to hold paramount the safety and welfare of the public. He wonders what this obligation implies in this situation. As he sees it, he faces two options:

Option 1
He can make no attempt to change his firm’s policy, which is to manufacture mostly type a detectors and sell a few Type B detectors (3 percent of the firm’s fire detector sales). Type A detectors, of course, are safety devices with a known deficiency, one of which can be corrected in Type B detectors. However, Type A detectors do work well 95 percent of the time. Also, far more people will buy Type A detectors than B under present market conditions.

Option 2
He can urge his company to go out of the business of making type A detectors and make only type b detectors, arguing that this is the only ethically responsible thing to do. In the long run, if other companies did the same thing, more lives would be saved and people would not be exposed to a danger of which they are generally not aware. (People generally do not know of the differences between Type A and Type B detectors.)

Which of these two options do you think is preferable? Can you think of any other options that Jim should consider?

Note: The factual assumption you make about the effect the company’s decision to stop manufacturing Type A detectors would have on the rest of the market (or other effects it might have) is crucial in this case. State your assumption and stay with it throughout the analysis. One assumption, of course, is that you just don’t have any idea what the effect would be. You could ask what conclusions you would get if your started with this. To complicate the situation, the assumption you make here may itself be in part governed by ethical considerations, even though it is about the facts. That is, when you don’t know what the case will be in the future, what assumption is it most ethically justifiable to make? After all, a lot rides on this assumption.

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