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Comment by abeppu | Hacker News Reader

The idea of punitive damages being awarded to a single person in a situation like this seems unjust on its own. If Roundup is responsible for this person's cancer, it's almost certainly responsible for the cancer of many other people, alive and dead. Clearly I am not a lawyer, but in cases of such a finding, I feel like there ought to be some mechanism to identify an affected class, and make proceeds benefit that class. The alternative seems to be that the first individual plaintiff whose judgement drains the defendant of funds pulls resources from later plaintiffs whose case is just as sound.

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Generally the first plaintiff (attorney) takes the greatest risk as there's no precedent of guilt. Afterwards the class action suits ride the single case momentum towards relatively easy payouts.

Easy payouts of seventeen cents a complaint I’m sure

Sometimes companies attempt to achieve this fair resolution using bankruptcy courts. And then people get mad about that, too.

Shaving off a part of the company as a sacrificial lamb is like trying to say "my fingertip is responsible for the murder, here take some skin shavings from the tip".

That isn't an accurate description of the Johnson and Johnson example.

Reforming how class actions are done is probably a very good idea. But Bayer has a market capitalization of over 45 billion. This judgement will probably get appealed and negotiated down. And if it isn't, there is a lot of value in Bayer to pay out in a class action if one succeeds.

If by "reform" you mean weaken class actions, I would argue that is a bad idea.

Larger businesses have already gone to great lengths to eliminate / curtail class actions.

I'd argue that this weakening is the root cause of a chunk of the aggregate problems I see discussed on HN.

It is in a company's interest to harm a great many people a little bit because the people often have to challenge the company as individuals rather than as a group. And the economics often make no sense in that way, so the company is functionally immune to the effects of its harm.

Further weakening the remaining viability of that case type stands to only encourage companies to commit more aggregate harms.

In other countries this is addressed by government regulation. The US prefers to use class action lawsuits and punitive damages.

Businesses aren't trying to harm. They aren't a Mao or a Stalin just going for The Greater Good no matter how many people they have to kill. They're trying to make a profit, and sometimes horribly unethical people in those businesses will not care about harm in order to make a profit. But the goal isn't harm.

To be clear, I was not suggesting the intent was harm for harm's sake. I was suggesting that it was in the company's/businesses' interest to harm. I agree that, often, that interest is framed as making profit, but it can also be framed as reducing cost, not having to care, etc.

The bigger point is that such an incentive exists and that it is further incentivized if the individuals who are harmed are deprived of a mechanism to resist.

> framed as making profit, but it can also be framed as reducing cost

Reducing cost does increase profit. Profit is (basically) revenue minus cost.

> The bigger point is that such an incentive exists and that it is further incentivized if the individuals who are harmed are deprived of a mechanism to resist.

Of course. Russia is invading Ukraine right now, as causing harm can benefit you, if you don't care about harm. This isn't a business thing; it's a people thing.

It's just that the blast radius of a business's harm is much smaller than a state's, and it's possible to shape rules so that profit incentives line up (even better) with harm minimisation. There's no harm minimisation you can do when a power-hungry person gets into a political position.

Future archaeologists will find the global layer of lead in soil, ice, etc. and wonder who these supervillains were and why they were not promptly shot.

Tobacco? Asbestos? Leaded gasoline? Uncontained mining tailings and failures of tailings piles? Oil w.r.t. global warming? They are working to continue harm. As if I accidentally stabbed someone and decided the best next step is to stab deeper.

This doesn't argue against the point I was making.

When I say "They are working to continue harm." I mean that yes, they are trying to harm. Intending to harm. Knowingly. Almost always knowing it before the public knows it.

How is "we're trying to make a profit here, we do not care about harm" any different than Mao's or Stalin's "we're doing it for The Greater Good, we do not care about harm"?

Stalin wasn't a Libertarian. More on the Effective Altruism spectrum.

Monsanto is the main culprit here. I don’t know how they convinced Bayer to buy them and tale on this albatross.

Undoubtedly Monsanto are (were), but greedy Bayer should have done proper due diligence about the risks of acquiring it. Presumably the net value of the acquisition and the extent of uninsured risks were known and considered acceptable at that point.

Disclaimer: I used to work for Bayer, but nothing related to ex-Monsanto. Also, I have never had contact with the people who made these decisions, only heard things on passing, so take this with a grain of salt.

I believe the reasoning went like this: food security is the big issue of our times, making agricultural products a market with a high growth potential. And big companies like Bayer have an attitude of "top 5 or nothing". Monsanto was the last "big" company up for sale with a portfolio that could push Bayer's Crop Science division to the top, even when accounting for the possibility of losing the first trial.

I believe the CEO who led the merger (with the blessing of the board) will be remembered as the plague that brought Bayer to its knees. But the rich people on the board thought the idea made sense.

The mind boggles.

The primary function of the U.S. civil judicial system is to adjudicate disputes, which is what it did here. Making society more just is an overarching, but ultimately, secondary goal.

But the concept of punitive damages is about some claim on justice, right? Like, "in addition to causing harm to this other party worth $m, because your behavior was so bad, you should pay a further $n whose value is about your badness which demands punishment, rather than about their loss."

$7M in compensatory damages and $325M in punitive damages sounds like almost all the dollars in this are about justice, not dispute settlement.

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