This manifests itself in viewers electing politicians who are more tough on crime than the last election.
Or to put it another way, assuming that I share a common moral sense with my fellow citizens, I would much prefer a legal system that is strongly associated with morality than one that is not.
If your objection is that the law feels to retributive, then that is a separate issue.
To maintain existing power structures
Perhaps it's meaningful the other way around, too. So many people I see don't want more rigid tax laws, because morals are enough. I argue that morals guiding tax laws only cause to harm those good enough to have morals following the tax laws.
It would seem morals should perhaps guide the desired end result of the law, like no killing your neighbor, but the laws to get to that end state might be counter intuitive. Something Americans suffer greatly from grasping.
The issue with morality based laws is that morals are subjective. I would prefer a legal system with absolutely no morality - instead being based off of reason and logical conclusions. Being explained well enough in layman terms that people can see why the law is the way it is. "Pay your taxes for schools and roads. Don't kill you neighbor because you wouldn't want to be killed. Don't steal because you wouldn't want to be stolen from."
Morality based laws is how you end up with "It's criminal to be a homosexual. Skirts must pass the knee. Cannabis and alcohol are only for bad people. You must be [religion] to be moral, because only immoral people aren't part of [religion]".
Reason and logical conclusions are not contradictory to a citizenry's moral intuitions, but are orthogonal to them.
Existing laws in the US are largely based on protestant morals. That's kind of the point I was going for: morality based laws can change on a whim once the publicly held views of what is moral changes and that should be seen as a bad thing and it is unfortunate our current laws are so heavily rooted in morality instead of reason. Also, the two can overlap! I'm not saying they never can, I'm saying they sometimes don't. And the times in history where they don't overlap is where you'll see many of the largest crimes against humanity committed simply because it was "legal (and by extension: moral)" to do so.
So many people seem content in their assumption that the state is essentially benevolent and wise and on their side.
Even with the recent spate of ridiculous arrests and prosecutions we've had over freedom-of-speech issues (which some of us find terrifying), you get this attitude of "well, it seems a bit harsh, but he did break the law!"
I like to remind people that you don't need to look very far back for examples of when the state got it very, very wrong (by modern standards of morality). The illegality of homosexuality, and the cruel punishment inflicted on people like Alan Turing, is the most obvious example of this.
The action is under consideration because it causes some benefit, worth $A.
The action may cause some public-relations fallout, which in turn will cause some amount of lost business (or analogous malus). The total losses caused by public-relations effects are a continuous random variable; and a complicated one, because the causality chain between action and the final losses involves multiple random events.
But, it has some expected value, $B > $0. (Disregard outliers, so as to better approximate the median outcome rather than the mean outcome.)
Finally, the action will inevitably cost some resources to implement, worth a total of $C.
(Again, all three quantities $A, $B and $C are nonnegative.)
We can then evaluate whether the action may be taken. That question is equivalent to the following:
"Is it legal? And if so, then does it hold that $A > $B + $C?"
(In the larger context, then, if multiple actions may be taken, then choosing which single one should be taken is a matter of maximizing that same inequality rather than truth-testing it.)
* * * * *
Why should we use any decision-making process other than the above?
Equivalently: why should we take into account any further "morality", beyond merely legality plus long-term expected-value for oneself?
That's why.
That logic is exactly the rational thing to do, provided that settlements are the only consequence of that flaw.
If, on the other hand, this being the real world, there is some probability that customers will discover this flaw (e.g. reading a news article about such a crash-and-burn) and thereby demand fewer cars, causing fewer or cheaper sales ... then that also affects the calculation.
So, aside from this quote representing some degree of sloppiness, which can't be solved with "morality" ... I don't see the problem here.
Your proposed framework would make for a silly Ayn Rand book or two, but little more.
If they were important, then there would be economic value to them.
(And to some extent this is in fact the case: even once the de Havilland Comet's metal-fatigue issues were compensated-for and recalls completed, nobody wanted to fly on it, so it became a commercial flop, and now the air-transport leader is Boeing not de Havilland.)
What justifies this statement? It seems nearly mind-bogglingly false to me so I would be interested to hear support for it.
If there are two alternate (competing) goods, and one is cheaper but the other is "Produced Ethically in Accordance with X Standards", then each person chooses whether that certification - and the qualitative difference it signifies - matters to them enough to pay the difference in price between that product and its cheaper competitor.
Or, to use another example elsewhere in this thread: if someone is in the market for a car, and one of the cars that meets their criteria is the Pinto, then it is up to them to decide whether the reduction-of-risk of fuel combustion justifies buying a more expensive vehicle that isn't a Pinto.
In either case, the macro-level effect will be that some portion of customers will buy the inferior product, and some will buy the superior product, and if there is sufficient disparity in the quantity-demanded, then the suppliers have greater incentive to produce the product with the higher quantity-demanded (but any quantitative mismatch between supply and demand will cause temporary fluctuations which will quickly self-correct, preserving the equilibrium in the long run). Ergo, if a good is superior in some way such that that superiority is "important", then that good will outsell any competition that lacks that quality.
How do you think Ford communicated with pre-sale consumers re: their product's inadequately reinforced rear end, insufficient crumple zone, "essentially ornamental" rear bumper, and increased risk of death secondary to fire or combustion? Under your scheme, how do consumers who wish to avoid death by fire learn of these defects? What economic interest does Ford have to disclose the problem if the deaths are cheaper than fixing it?
"In the [Pinto] memo, Ford estimated the cost of fuel system modifications to reduce fire risks in rollover events to be $11 per car across 12.5 million cars and light trucks (all manufacturers), for a total of $137 million. The design changes were estimated to save 180 burn deaths and 180 serious injuries per year, a cost to society of $49.5 million."
If people read the news, some nonzero amount equal to the amount of lost Pinto sales. If the competition has been crash-tested and the Pinto isn't, then Ford was already continually losing money by losing the "non-cheapskate" market segment.
> Under your scheme, how do consumers who wish to avoid death by fire learn of these defects?
Read the news, be mechanical engineers, prefer products that have been given favorable ratings by independent crash-test firms, or start an independent crash-test firm.
(No, I have no idea whether crash-testing was already a thing when the Pinto came out. Regardless, such things are, generally-speaking, how one solves these information problems.)
I think we can end this here. The idea that average Americans should "be mechanical engineers" just to not die in a preventable fire is insane and really not worthy of further discussion.
Thus, the "economic" in "economic value" is actually redundant.
And if something has no value, to anyone ... what importance could it have?
(except perhaps in the history books, e.g. the now-bloodstained clothes that Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria wore when he was assassinated)
This seems rather elementary/tautological/Econ-101 to me.
If it does, it's only because you're deliberately engaging in tautology.
Not all human value can be expressed in monetary terms. At a minimum, market forces cannot and will not raise the dead any time soon. In death there is no recourse that will make you whole. No amount of money will restore the value to you. That's why regulation and prevention exists – because the market can't cheat death.
Now, they did do a recall for a problem with the cruise control cutoff switch possibly leaking brake fluid. But not included in that recall was any damage that leaked brake fluid might have done to the anti-lock brake control module, or any of the other electronic or electrical components located beneath the potential leak site.
Such parts can be corroded by leaked brake fluid, causing electrical shorts and burnt-out components. And the brake fluid is itself quite flammable. Your Ford Windstar can burst into flames while you are at speed on a highway. Or it could simply light itself on fire sitting unattended in your driveway and turn itself into a total loss. Most of the time, it just drains its own battery or kills all the instrument gauges in the dashboard.
No recall for this problem. And yet, the vehicle has already had several previous recalls, including one for the rear axle potentially breaking in half. This leads me to believe that there is another term, D, for the estimated dollar amount for a loss to brand value due to doing another recall.
But then again, "Found on Road, Dead" didn't come from nowhere, so I'm not sure how much value is left there.
Did you pick that example because of the Ford Pinto case? In case you didn't know about it, that's exactly the cost/benefit analysis that Ford did when they discovered that the gas tank on the Pinto would rupture if the car was hit from behind at 31 mph or greater. Here's the infamous internal memo:
http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/tortsprof/files/FordMemo.pd...
Look at Table 3 on page 6. Paying $200,000 per death would cost $49.5 million. Strengthening the tank at $11 per car would cost $137 million. Clearly it was cheaper to pay settlements on the deaths.
That merely shows that tort settlements at that time didn't have an accurate price on human life. $200,000 is about $1.13 million in today's money, which is only about 7 years of senior-dev salary. An early death usually costs more than 7 years of healthy life.
If we assume that the median car-fire death actually had 20 years of healthy life ahead of them, instead of 7, then we can conclude that typical settlements should have cost about $500,000 (in the same 1973 money) instead of $200,000.
This would have raised the total tort cost estimate to $123 million, at which point the two figures are close enough that the entire discussion would have ceased to be worth the amount of C-level labor that must have gone into it.
(The above also assumes that one's own life is worth as much as one can earn prior to death-by-natural-causes. I have yet to find evidence to disprove this hypothesis with respect to my own life ... but some people feel that life is even more valuable. If those people were to perform the same process as I did above, then their conclusion would be even more powerful than mine.)
When you underprice something you have, don't be surprised to find yourself in a drastic shortage of it.
It avoids the hard question grandparent asked. Legality only partitions behaviors into legal and illegal. Morality is more like a partial order which lets you compare behaviors.
Morality then is clearly more general and must inform legality not the other way around. Which is to say, just because you aren't breaking the law doesn't mean you are a good person. And further, how should we construct legal systems which are moral?
Yes, it is. The comment I was responding to, appears to assert that there is something more to it; some kind of "morality". I question the purpose of following it, when it can only possibly cause one to make decisions with lesser expected-value (i.e. self-sabotage).
This process is still achievable (called 'perekovka' by the Soviets), but it can take whole generations, and a great deal of power.
Besides, when the law isn't anchored in commonly shared sense of morality, you'll basically have no other option but a politically oppressive system (to balance this factor out).
Without empathy, and very little attention to the matter , could you expect any different result ?
But in any case, as Manuel De Landa says, all real systems are combinations of both meshwork (associative freedom) and hierarchy (imposed structure) -- that often transform into each other. http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm