James Kant's Actions From A Dilemma Of Kantian Ethics

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James Liang, a member of a team of Volkswagen engineers in Germany, assisted in the creation of a “clean” Diesel engine for sale in the United States. During the development of the engine, the engineers discovered they could not design an engine to meet the US Clean Air Act and satisfy customer needs. Liang and the engineers decided to create a “defeat device” (Shoenberg, Naughton, & Butters, 2016) in order to cheat the emissions testing process. Liang and his team then tried to cover up their device when US officials noticed and inquired about the discrepancies between test results and actual performance of the engines. Liang recently pleaded guilty to charges of defrauding the US government and agreed to cooperate with investigators working on this case (Tabuchi & Ewing, 2016). This ethical analysis will focus on Liang’s actions throughout the course of this scandal. This paper addresses moral questions concerning loyalty to one’s company and fractured responsibility from a viewpoint of Kantian ethics.
Kant’s ethical theory states that an act is good only if one performs the act with good intentions. An individual’s will governs good intentions, the force that animates the individual’s body and actions. In order to determine if the will is good, Kant proposed the creation and testing of a …show more content…

Therefore, defense attorneys can make the argument that Liang is not responsible for the entire scandal because a team of engineers defrauded the US government. This argument represents a use of the fractured responsibility principle. Liang, however, stated in his guilty plea that he did have knowledge of the fraudulent actions of the engineering team. Regardless of his physical involvement in the effort to bypass the Clean Air Act, Kant’s theory shows Liang acted unethically in lying about his knowledge of the team’s

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