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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

Hypothetically, let's say you had perfect access to all internal communications, emails, etc. And after all of this, you never found a smoking gun - not anyone to blame directly for this. The Max issue was caused by a culture of stupidity, greed, cronyism, etc. etc.

What then? Should we shut Boeing down? Should we arrest the executive team out of principle?

I think a lot of enormous fuckups like this are not directed by individuals, but more likely a miasma of incompetence that cannot be directly associated with any one person. It's more like we should arrest Harvard Business School professors for teaching MBA strategy wrong.

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Isn't this why we pay the executive team the big bucks?

It’s one thing to fire the exec team. It’s another to charge them with criminal responsibility, especially when the shareholders will ultimately fund their defense one way or another. I don’t think it would be proven.

My comment was a broader point about why corporations never seem to have employees get charged. It’s because they usually aren’t liable and won’t get convicted by a jury, and the government subpoenas all the records and determined it won’t fly.

If you disagree with my assessment, you must think there is a conspiracy in which government lawyers collude with corporate leaders to protect them. That’s a very strong conspiracy. I’m not saying you are wrong, but recognize what you are asserting.

> It’s one thing to fire the exec team. It’s another to charge them with criminal responsibility

What is their role, their contribution to the company, if not "taking responsibility"?

And if that is not part of their task, how much cheaper can this role be fulfilled with sufficient impact by someone else?

Professional engineers can be held criminally responsible if a building they sign off on fails. Chartered accountants can be held criminally liable if they sign off on fudged books. I don't see why an executive can't be held responsible for creating a culture under which illegal activity is the only viable option for their employees.

> Should we arrest the executive team out of principle?

How about prohibiting them from holding executive positions in the future?

The upside of your proposal is that it'll create a very strong disincentive for this kind of behavior.

But if we really can't attribute blame to specific individuals, your proposal is effectively collective punishment where individuals that are genuinely innocent are punished because of wrongdoings of other members of the group. From a justice perspective, we're in murky moral waters. An analogy would be to punish everyone in a shared household if we know that one member of that household committed a crime but we can't determine which one specifically (and let's assume that the innocent members of the household don't know and aren't hiding information). This would be a state of affairs that everyone would rightly protest. So we need to think carefully as to whether we want to enact your proposal.

Your comparison is incredibly exaggerated. Being a highly-paid C-level exec of a $120B corporation that holds people's lives in its hand isn't exactly a human right like living in a household. It's as much a privilege as anything can be. And it can and absolutely should be revocable when you show your leadership allows people to people die under your authority, your awareness notwithstanding. When hundreds of people die under your watch, it isn't about you anymore. It's about the rest of society. You can tweak it if you feel it prohibits things like being a CEO of a self-proprietorship or a small family business or whatever; I don't care if you want to do that. Just draw a line that ensures they would get nowhere near a position like this in the future.

The ultimate point being: you can still let them make decisions about their own lives if you want, but that doesn't imply you have to let them make decisions that affect other people's lives.

I absolutely agree that leadership at Boeing was responsible for the deaths but the fact that we can’t get it right for (comparatively) petty crimes means we are unable to get out right for the big ones. I’m of course referring to the sheriff in California who has not been charged for corruption and has not been forced to resign:

Previously on HN

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25193699

They didn't even touch the Sheriff.

> Sheriff Laurie Smith, who has the authority to issue CCW permits, has not been charged with a crime.

Either i. the sheriff knew about/was in on this scheme and must be put in prison or ii. the sheriff didn't know about how her number two was soliciting bribes using her authority to grant/deny licenses and must resign because that is just gross negligence.

Which one is it?

This is how tithings used to work. Ten men would be grouped into a tithing, and if any of those men were suspected of a crime, then the rest of the group either had to prove their innocence or had to condemn the guilty party. If they did neither, all were equally punished for the crime.

In principal, it strikes me as a good idea - it promotes collective good behaviour, and responsibility for ones peers.

It's collective guilt. Are you sure this is a good idea? It might be great in pre-Norman England.

Good luck hiring anyone for a struggling company. Can't turn it around? You get punished.

Well, if the company is struggling to NOT kill people...

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