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Nicholas Tippner
CST 373
13 December 2017
Emission Ethics

When looking back on the events of the Volkswagen emissions scandal and how it

affected the United States, I’m left wondering what led up to the scandal, why more wasn’t done,

and when we can expect to start feeling the larger consequences of the results of the recalls and

the court cases brought against the company. I’m Nicholas Tippner, a student in the CST 373

Ethics in Comm & Tech class, and a future graduate of CSU Monterey Bay. As a Computer

Science major, issues like this impact me in a major way as they introduce ethical quandaries

that I might face in my future workplace. Would I create something that flaunted the law if it

meant I lost my job if I didn’t create it? Would I avoid whistleblowing if doing so meant my

coworkers all lost their jobs and potentially go to jail? Would I defend my actions by pointing to

the fact that I was protecting the interests of the company I worked for? I look to get answers to

these questions and what the legal and ethical consequences would be for me if I answered yes to

all of them. These ethical quandaries arise from our culture’s need for self-improvement by any

means necessary, defended by an appeal to the majority. If every company breaks one law, then I

would ask why my involvement in breaking that same law should matter. It’s important to

address these ideals because conflicts between ourselves, our companies, and our laws will

continue to arise as each will continue to get in the way of the other. I’ll begin with the history of

our laws.

The Clean Air Act, the major law that VW broke, was established in 1975 to create a set

of air standards that would “improve public health” and “regulate emissions of hazardous air

pollutants” (EPA, 2017). Due to state failures to implement these standards and the plans that

were laid out for them to complete, the Act was amended in 1977 and again in 1990 to establish
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new goals and timelines for the states to meet. Before 1990, the wording of the Act focused on

creating a risk-based program with few standards. After 1990, the new Clean Air Amendments

added major technology-based standards for major sources of hazardous air pollutants. Major

sources are defined as sources that emit or have the potential to emit 10 tons per year or more of

a hazardous air pollutant or 25 tons per year or more of a combination of hazardous air

pollutants. These new standards, which are referred to as “maximum achievable control

technology” also require the maximum reduction of emissions of hazardous air pollutants. Eight

years after these standards are issued for a source category, such as cars, the EPA is required to

review those standards, determine if there is still risk associated with them, and revise those

standards if needed (EPA, 2017).

These standards were made stricter as the technology for cars evolved, and car

manufacturers began to have trouble meeting these standards and started looking for ways

around them. Volkswagen’s answer to this was a “defeat device,” which is code that figures out

if a car is in a lab or out in the real world, and adjusts its performance accordingly so its

hazardous air pollutant emissions appear to be less than they are. The first EPA court case

brought against these defeat devices was back in 1974, when Volkswagen was discovered to be

using them on a “substantial number of 1973 model year vehicles” (Geuss, 2017). Volkswagen

settled out of court for $120,000, while admitting no wrongdoing. While VW was the first to get

caught using defeat devices, they weren’t the last. Over the years, Ford, General Motors, Honda,

and Caterpillar all were caught using defeat devices to get around emissions tests and improve

their ratings (Geuss, 2017).

Which brings us back to today, and the most recent emissions scandal that has occurred.

In September 2015, it was revealed that Volkswagen had outfitted several million cars to include
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defeat devices, including the Jetta, Beetle, Golf, and Passat. When the defeat devices were

disabled and the cars were tested again, it was found that their emissions were 40 times over the

legal limit. While this definitively broke US laws, other countries have similar emissions laws

and have opened investigations into VW. These countries include the UK, Italy, France, South

Korea, Canada and, the host of Volkswagen’s headquarters, Germany. As a result of this scandal

coming to light, VW will be recalling 2.4 million cars in Germany, 1.2 million in the UK, and

500,000 in the US (Hotten, 2015). Two years after the scandal broke, the verdict and fines from

the EPA have finally been laid down. Volkswagen will have to pay a $2.8 billion criminal

penalty, as well as a $14.7 billion civil settlement. In addition to this, it will be buying back all

cars rigged with the defeat devices. Finally, seven former Volkswagen employees are facing

criminal charges, with one already having plead guilty. Five of the seven are currently in

Germany awaiting private trials, while the last, Oliver Schmidt, the person in charge of ensuring

compliance with US emissions laws, faces the most charges of the seven. Prosecutors in

Germany have considered going after the former CEO, Martin Winterkorn, who stepped shortly

after the scandal broke in 2015 (Eisenstein, 2017).

Seeing as it has only been a couple years since the scandal broke, this paper will focus on

how various well-known news media writers packaged and presented the scandal shortly after

the knowledge. The first article is an opinion article from MSNBC that looks at what exactly

went wrong and who’s to blame. At first, the journalist looks at the culture and asks whether

anyone confronted their boss about what they were asked to do, and debated whether it would be

worse if no one had had a problem with what they were doing. Ultimately, it seems like there

would have been at least one person who went up the ladder to try to get some accountability.

Seeing as VW was getting away with using defeat devices for decades, it is probable that there
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was suppression of the truth. The journalist realizes this and demands accountability, “If

employees did question the orders and refused to obey, what became of them? VW should be

required to answer this question. A culture that punishes internal efforts to do the right thing will

remain a culture prone to cheating and fraud” (Chaleff, 2015). He then goes on to suggest that

the only way to stop this culture from continuing to spread is stop silencing dissent and

emphasize the importance of personal accountability. “Everyone up and down the organizational

chart must understand personal accountability and how to intelligently and safely exercise it”

(Chaleff, 2015). This article maintains that VW workers being silenced and a lack of personal

accountability were the main contributors to the scandal, and that scandals like this will continue

to occur for as long as corporations continue to prevent their employees from acting in an ethical

manner.

The next article is a commentary piece from CNN. The author starts the article by

prefacing how great Volkswagen is, how they’ve employed tens of thousands of qualified

engineers, and how their CEO has a PhD in metal physics. The rest of this article continues on

like that, seeming to indicate that the emissions scandal was a one-time mistake perpetrated by

people who made too many promises. “This week, we found out how smart and innovative VW

is. And how insanely stupid” (Spicer, 2015). Nowhere in the article does the author confront the

ethics of what the software engineers did, only that middle managers were pressured to deliver

on promises made by top executives, all while praising the company itself. “People are asking

why such an intelligent company could do something so stupid. The real reason is that

sometimes a bit of stupidity pays off for everyone -- at least in the short term” (Chaleff, 2015).

The conclusion by the author seems to be that Volkswagen, under pressure from regulators,
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customers, shareholders, and their own employees, made a mistake that they wouldn’t make

again, as they’re intelligent company staffed with thousands of intelligent people.

The final article is another commentary piece released by Fortune magazine written by

Paul Argenti, a professor of Corporate Communication employed at Dartmouth. In the article, he

states that blaming top executives misses the underlying cause of this kind of ethical event

occurring. Instead of the top executives being at fault, he blames business culture as a whole. “It

may be many things, but my sense is that rather than a large conspiracy, it is yet another example

of a company hell bent on growth whose performance culture created this problem rather than

direct orders from the top of the company” (Argenti, 2015). He cites a National Business Ethics

Survey that covered the ethical situations employees were faced with over a ten-year period,

where employees wrote that of situations that would cause them to compromise their ethical

standards, 70% felt it was caused by pressure to meet unrealistic business objectives, and 75%

said they faced pressure from senior or middle management as the primary enforcer of this

pressure. Argenti goes on to propose five steps for a solution to prevent ethical standards from

being violated in the workplace. Most of the solutions revolved around improving

communication about the company’s goals and standards to their employees, with one of the

solutions being the foundation for the others: “Explicitly state intolerance for wrongdoing and

repeatedly suggest that nothing is worth losing your reputation over” (Argenti, 2015). At the end

of the article, the author seems to blame general performance culture, and chalks up the

emissions scandal to a miscommunication between top executives and their employees about

whether to prioritize success over ethical standards.

While many journalists debated on who was at fault for the Volkswagen emissions

scandal, many agreed that performance culture and top executives making promises they
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couldn’t keep were what led up to it happening. However, they did not go over who this scandal

affected, other than speculating what kind of action would be taken against Volkswagen

employees. It would appear that the major interested parties in this situation are government

officials in charge of enforcing emissions laws, environmentalists, and anyone who bought one

of the millions of affected cars. Those millions were out in full force when the scandal broke,

with Volkswagen’s communication chief saying, “There was something like a tsunami.

Thousands of calls and emails coming in at the same time” (Hakim, 2016). Those displeased

with Volkswagen’s actions were able to voice their opinions in other ways as well, with last

year’s Harris Poll’s Reputation Quotient putting Volkswagen at the bottom of their top 100 most

visible companies (Hakim, 2016). People also flocked to social media sites like Twitter and

Facebook to have a platform for their reactions to the scandal.

Vanitha Swaminathan and Suyun Mah conducted an analysis of more than 100,000

tweets about Volkswagen after the emissions scandal had broken, in order to gain an

understanding of how public sentiment changed and whether Volkswagen faced permanent

reputation damage as a result of the scandal. They took tweets from four windows in September,

October, and January, to cover the month the scandal broke and the month that the U.S.

announced their court case against Volkswagen. Once they had the tweets gathered together,

they used Vader Sentiment analysis to try to ascertain the attitude people had towards

Volkswagen while they were tweeting about them. The results were that half of the tweets during

the first week of the scandal breaking were definably negative, with less than a quarter being

positive. The number of negative tweets began to decrease over time, but spiked when it was

reported that the U.S. was suing Volkswagen in January. Shortly afterwards, the number of

negative tweets dropped to twenty percent (Swaminathan & Mah, 2016). It seems likely that this
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is not due to Volkswagen regaining brand trust, but rather that this news was overshadowed by

other current events, such as the 2016 presidential election.

Overall, the general public seemed to disapprove of Volkswagen’s actions. The BBC

collected a series of responses that gave a better picture of the kinds of people who bought

Volkswagen vehicles and their reasons behind their reactions to the scandal. Some approved of

Volkswagen’s admission of guilt, “As much as I am not a fan of @Volkswagen, I gotta hand it to

them for owning the problem rather than making excuses #Volkswagen” while others were

personally affected by the emissions scandal, “I purchased a Golf Bluemotion specifically for

low emissions to help do my bit for the environment. I and my son suffer from asthma. I’m

disgusted by the actions here…” (BBC). Many environmentalists who had bought Volkswagen

vehicles hoping to lower their carbon footprint were upset to find out that the CO2 emissions

were much higher than they had been told. Overall, the trust in the company by the public

appears to have been broken, and several of the respondents who had been loyal to the company

are now looking to buy their cars elsewhere.

Customers had wanted their cars to be environmentally friendly, lawmakers wanted their

cars to operate within emissions standards, and Volkswagen employees wanted their cars to meet

the goals set in place by the major executives of the company. These desires represent three

ethical framework demands coming into conflict with each other. The first ethical framework is

utilitarianism, which is defines ethical actions as those that increase the number of good things in

the world and decrease the number of bad things (Utilitarianism, n.d.). In this case, some

customers that bought Volkswagen cars did so to decrease their carbon footprint, which is a

beneficial action for humanity as a whole. However, the scandal revealed that their carbon

footprint was actually bigger than legally allowed, which means those who bought the car for the
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previously stated reason had their “good” action turned into a “bad” one. Seeing as there were

millions of cars affected this scandal, it can be concluded that Utilitarianism would define the

actions taken by Volkswagen to be ethically wrong.

The next social framework that applies to this situation is Cultural Relativism, which is a

view that moral codes and ethics are determined by cultural norms and laws, which means that

ethics would vary from country to country (Rachels, 2007). Seeing as Volkswagen sells cars all

over the world, the ethics of the emission scandal would vary as well. For countries like the

United States and Germany, which have clearly defined lows and cultural norms towards

corporate honesty and lowering hazardous emissions, it is clearly unethical under the framework

of Cultural Relativism for Volkswagen to cheat in their emissions tests by using defeat devices.

However, in countries with weaker emissions standards, like Australia, their actions could be

considered ethically correct, as long as they didn’t go outside the laws of the country or the

expectations of the culture.

The final social framework for this scandal is Egoism, which is the claim that each

individual person should have only one ultimate aim; their own interests. An action is ethical if it

maximizes one’s own self-interest (Shaver, 2014). Whether the employees of Volkswagen were

directly ordered to create defeat devices to avoid emissions by top executives of the company or

they were pressured to meet unrealistic expectations set by their bosses, it remained in the

interest of the software engineers to design engines pass the required emissions tests. In order to

maximize their self-interest in the quickest way possible, it becomes ethical for these engineers

to put code into the car software that would get around the emissions test. It was also ethical for

the company to accept this solution, as the benefits they enjoyed by doing so were getting to
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meet government standards in a cost-effective way, maintain lower prices for their customers,

and have a reputation as being a “clean car” company.

This scandal had left the future of diesel engines up in the air, with engine manufacturers

left uncertain about the future of diesel. Car part manufacturer Melett wrote an article that used

recent facts and figures to speculate about whether diesel engines had a future, and if they did,

what kind of future what it be. Melett pointed to actions that had been taken by other nations as a

result of the Volkswagen scandal. “In a bid to improve air quality in Norway, leading political

parties have called for a ban of the sale of all diesel passenger cars by 2025. In contrast, the UK

government has set policies in place to push low emission vehicles – which includes diesel

passenger cars.” (Melett, 2017) These actions would indicate that, in the future, environmental-

focused countries will focus on air quality and put more policies in place to limit the use of diesel

engines, while countries that are industry-focused will likely update their emissions standards but

continue to use diesel engines, as government policy is already beginning to lean that way.

“Government policies to reduce carbon emissions have indirectly promoted and incentivized the

use of diesel over petrol, leading to an increase in the number of diesel cars on the road” (Melett,

2017).

Regarding the use of the defeat devices in cars, the statistics would indicate that just as

many have been used in the past, many will continue to be used in the future. While Volkswagen

has had the most well-known recall, other companies have had emissions-related recalls,

including Chrysler, General Motors, Toyota, and Mercedes (He & Jin, 2017). As emissions

regulations tighten further going into the future, it can be expected that more companies will

succumb to the pressure and begin to code in ways to get around these new regulations, albeit in

a much more careful way. It would seem that defeat devices will continue to be used as long as
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they remain a cheaper way than investing to create a more efficient. Although the steep fine

levied on Volkswagen could deter companies from doing so in the future.

Angie Zhou, from the School of Global Policy and Strategy at UC San Diego, proposed a

few ways that Volkswagen improve as a company and regain consumer trust. These solutions

could apply to all auto corporations that are concerned about the impact of the Volkswagen

scandal. The first solution she proposes is for Volkswagen to rebrand itself as an

environmentally-friendly company, and take some serious steps towards mending the damage

they caused by releasing millions of emissions-heavy vehicles into the global market. The second

solution is for Volkswagen to use an independent verification agency. “While Volkswagen has

its own internal team that examines vehicle emissions, the company should also partner up with

other independent verification agencies to rebuild consumer trust. Some agencies that the

company could consider partnering up with include the World Business Council for Sustainable

Development (WCSBD), Fair Labor Association (FLA), Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and

the Landfill Methane Outreach Program (LMOP)” (Zhou, 2016). The last solution she proposes

is that Volkswagen posts a bond to the European Union that states that if they get caught doing

this again, they will agree to pay a large amount of money to both the EU and those affected.

After reviewing the facts of this situation, I believe that both the top executives and the

employees that designed the defeat devices acted unethically, and that there need to be major

changes to prevent this kind of thing from happening again. When I first heard about the scandal,

I believed it was a conspiracy by the executives of Volkswagen to get around following

emissions laws, but after reading the articles about it I recognized that the software engineers

needed to have personal responsibility for what they created, and that there is a toxic system of

promising beyond your capabilities that makes people act unethically in order to achieve goals
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that would be impossible within laws or moral codes. Seeing as Volkswagen has been caught

using defeat devices as far back as the 1970’s, I believe the solution to preventing widespread

corporate noncompliance is to extend greater accountability for those who break the law. The

massive fines currently being faced by Volkswagen are certainly a step in the right direction, as

well as the conviction of Volkswagen’s chief of engineering and environmental office, but the

fact remains that many of those involved avoided consequence. One can only hope that those

awaiting trial in Germany will receive justice, and discourage future executives from allowing

unethical behavior in their workplace.

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References

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10, 2017, from http://www.bbc.com/news/business-34322961

Chaleff, I. (2015, September 26). VW’s culture of blind obedience: What went wrong and how

to fix it. MSNBC. Retrieved December 10, 2017, from

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/vws-culture-blind-obedience-what-went-wrong-and-how-

fix-it

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