At some point, you’re doing enough harm knowingly at scale that monetary damages and prison are insufficient.
At some point, you’re doing enough harm knowingly at scale that monetary damages and prison are insufficient.
In this case, force 3M to pay for everything, if they refuse or can't the government sells of the company to pay for the cost. I'm not a fan of the death sentence, but I have no problem killing of evil companies.
What I don't get is how people can make these decisions. You're informed that your product is dangerous, but you really like money so screw it.... What kind of person does that? That has to be a mental problem.
Im generally against death sentences for heat of the moment situations. Think: murder.
But in a situation where you’ve had legal teams working with you, where you’ve been planning this out, and where you know what the damage to this is etc., you’re basically a massive threat to society.
The active planning, intent, and maliciousness is something that should be made an example out of.
Death sentences for crimes where the person doing the crime likely didn’t even get a chance to think about the consequences is useless. Death sentences and removal of all assets from corporate executives that have caused a significant amount of damage would have a deterrence effect.
So I think life in prison with no possibility of parole plus removal of all assets is ideal.
But I think this should only apply to the CEO and the board not everyone up and down the chain at least in the US where we have a “right to work”.
I don’t know if the law will allow an effective removal of all assets. I’m thinking of trust fund babies and such…
Edit: at least in the US, I think there is a possibility of a pardon or commutation by POTUS. I think we need to abolish that as well or at least it should be that if you pardon or commute the sentence for one person for a crime, it automatically makes the same change (pardon/commutation) for everyone convicted of that crime.
Civil asset forfeiture. The money itself is complicit in the criminal act.
"Plush mansion, good company, etc" vs "left to rot in a hole" type of thing.
I don’t need to see them tortured beforehand, as it serves little to no purpose (in my opinion).
There is no such thing as life long incarceration. They always get out early
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_imprisonment_in_England_a...
Musk is totally ok to use materials mined by enslaved children of Madagascar. Or abuse his employees. Or fire people who try to organize a union. Or do plenty of other shady or illegal stuff.
That kind of person.
Normal people can't get away with things like this, because the decisions would haunt our dreams.
Regular people make, logically, truly horrifying decisions constantly.
I bought some wine for a friends get-together. That's pretty normal.
But in doing so, I chose to have wine rather than vaccinate some children.
I chose having a drink over the lives of deprived children. Am I not a monster?
Two great books to start with:
- The Science of Evil: https://www.amazon.com/Science-Evil-Empathy-Origins-Cruelty/...
- The Psychopath Whisperer: The Science of Those Without Conscious: https://www.amazon.com/Psychopath-Whisperer-Science-Without-...
The average person's dinner involved a tremendous amount of sheer pain and suffering, but it's satisfying to their taste buds, so they are fine with it, and will find ways to rationalize it.
Most everyone is a psychopath at some level, capable of discarding empathy or rationalizing evil when it serves their own interests. The only difference with the CEOs is that they're doing it for money, not for taste. It's quite easy to imagine someone moving the goalposts for what is worth causing suffering for.
- The entire entity would be taken on ownership by the government agency at play. No existing stakeholders would be paid anything for this and operations would continue, assuming the operation is worth salvaging of course, with the corrections made needed.
- The entity would then be either sold in-whole or carved up into pieces to other large businesses. Shareholders, stakeholders, or investors are not made whole: instead, the revenue from these sales is used to repay or remediate the damage caused by the company.
- Top level leadership is, if it's felt is required, charged for neglecting their duties as leaders and fined, jailed, or otherwise punished.
- In the end the original entity is dissolved entirely, any remaining assets are sold in a process similar to the above, and the name is added to a "dead corporation" list and cannot be used at any time in the future.
We should not trust government agencies as they have zero accountability either. It is even worse.
Most shareholders didn't know PFAs were harmful, yet you're proposing they bear the punishment. Meanwhile, the people who did know that PFAs were harmful, walk away with years of salary with raises due to their increased performance due to killing people, and potentially even the profits from sale of stock before their murders were discovered.
The entire problem here is that people, not corporations, make decisions, and people, not corporations, need to be held responsible for their own decisions. When people decide to hide information like this for their own benefit, those people need to be held responsible.
(a) Sometimes the wrong people get convicted. In this context, irreversible punishments suck.
(b) “We’re going to kill you because killing people is wrong” is a weird look.
(b) It's not. Killing people that are evil is fine. Killing babies is wrong. You are intentionally simplifying the moral argument here to "killing people is wrong."
Maybe don't make prisons so awful that they constitute torture? That's very much a thing that we know how to do.
>Killing people that are evil is fine.
Who gets to decide what is evil? What happens when the definition of evil changes? Practically every genocide in history has been justified by that logic - they are evil, therefore we are justified in killing them. Other than vengeance, there is little benefit to state-sanctioned killing for the purposes of punishment; all state-sanctioned killing carries the risk of justifying other kinds of state-sanctioned killing, by removing the simple and clear moral foundation of what a legitimate state can or cannot do.
There are many examples of accused murderers who received fair trials, were convicted, and yet were still innocent.
This may be something that doesn't resonate with people who are not parents, but: if your government is willing to tolerate intentional, casual murder of children at scale, what's the point of having it in the first place? And let's remember: a government isn't imposed by the heavens. It's just another agreement between people, at scale.
Retribution might make us feel better, but it doesn't solve anything. It's shutting the stable doors after the horse has bolted. We don't need a special judicial exception for the mass murder of children: we need that to not happen in the first place. At that scale, it's not one person: it's an institutional failing. We need those institutional failings to not happen: talk of punishment, except to the extent it has a deterrent effect (which I'm generally sceptical of), is a distraction.
Aviation rarely blames pilots for plane crashes, even when it's clearly their fault (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_by_pilot#By_pilots_in_...): they do things like a two-in-cockpit policy. Aeroplanes are among the safest places in the world. That attitude seems a better one to mimic.
What does it truly mean, to say “never again”?
Same in this case, I feel there's a difference between deaths of children as a result of lack of care or attention, vs. knowingly letting it happen because of personal gains.
> In the years 1999–2015 the study found 65 cases of pilot suicide (compared to 195 pilot errors) and six cases of passengers who jumped from aircraft. There were 18 cases of homicide-suicide, totaling 732 deaths; of these events, 13 were perpetrated by pilots.
Pragmatically, I don't see a difference. I couldn't give a shit about the perpetrators: they have lost the right to factor into my moral calculus. I care about the children not dying.
I mean, I ultimately don't really want even more people to die over this. Rather, I want things like this to not happen. Ever. Death penalty sounds like a big step in this direction, in a world where white-collar crime isn't just not punished proportionally to the scale of damage, it's barely punished at all. I suppose it is a red herring, an idea of putting a band-aid on a much larger problem.
I'll note however, that pilot suicide is a qualitatively different scenario than executive knowingly causing death of some people, somewhere, because it's easy enough to do it and profit off it. There's only so much you can do about the former - at some point, it's down to an individual, their emotional state, and a moment. However, in the latter case, the process is much more sober, takes more time, and it's doubtful the perpetrator is themselves suicidal.
(The death penalty is bad for other reasons, and I don't feel this warrants an exception. But that's a different, and well-trodden, argument.)
> There's only so much you can do about the former - at some point, it's down to an individual, their emotional state, and a moment.
And yet, it is successfully averted by two-in-cockpit policies (excluding possibly China Eastern Airlines Flight 5735: investigations are still ongoing, so I'm not sure what went on there). If we can prevent this, we can prevent that.
So thanks for that bucket of cold water :).
--
Maybe we should make a list of topics where people frequently miss the point in this way? Like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions though this is probably not in scope for Wikipedia.
A different list I believe I could use is one that's listing some working mitigations to tough problems. Like, checklists are effective at this-and-this in medicine[link set 1], and this-and-that in aviation [link set 2]. "Two-in-cockpit" policies are effective at helping in this-and-that in aviation, to such-and-such degree [link set 3], etc. The motivation here is that it seems that some industries figured out ways to reduce the severity of various tough problems, and there may be an opportunity for cross-pollination, or staging those techniques into an even better mitigation.
RE the Moloch link, I'm not in the right mood to respond to the reply under that comment, nor do I have energy for this right now. I mostly disagree, but I note one point - it's true, at least for me, that realizing a problem is one of coordination at scale (and therefore likely systemic) makes me feel despair. The realization itself is a mood killer - I find myself recoiling from it, and thinking along the lines of "please let it not be a Moloch thing, please let it be something solvable, something that can be approached directly". I would love to know of a way to feel encouraged, instead of instantly demotivated, by this kind of problems.
EDIT:
Another one to your list of common point-misses: 4) what's the base rate, and 5) what's the effect size?
Prompted by 'userbinator remembering that one, and asking the important question. Paraphrasing, "if those chemicals are so very bad for us, and have been everywhere for decades, then where are the ill effects?".
It's like with dietetics and cancer scares. Consuming/not consuming red meat/coffee/artificial sweetener/whatever can give you cancer! How much of an increase? 10%? Over what base rate? 0.00001? In that case, it's affecting your lifespan less than worrying about it is.
The problem isn't some kind of game theory issue. The problem is the cultural phenomenon where people believe cruelty is a virtue. The solution is kindness, like people have been saying for thousands of years. (Also reorganising society somewhat.)
In Scott Alexander's terminology: we can build a garden, and keep Moloch out of it, because we are the only ones in our vicinity capable of being powerful agents of Moloch, and we can just… decide not to do that. So many societies have managed that over the years: it's just historical coincidence they didn't end up with industrial metallurgy, lots of boats, and a penchant for proselytism. But now, we don't have any other societies that could come from across the sea and influence us: we're globalised.
Our fate is in our hands, if we can step back from isolationist ethics and be kind (and stop trying to take over the world).
In your opinion. In the opinion of many others, there is no crime that deserves death, hence the widespread abolition of the death penalty in developed countries. We used to execute people for stealing cattle and I imagine that many people at the time though that it was an entirely right and proper punishment.
A jurisdiction that uses the death penalty with any real frequency will at some point inevitably execute an innocent man. What is the appropriate punishment for those who supported the laws that caused his death?
until then i'll just view it as a tool of the government to sate public bloodlust with regards to heinous crimes with the very thing they seek to punish : murder.
the very embodiment of "well, that's the best we can do." when confronted with the idea of correcting the loss of a life -- two losses to make the original victim feel less alone. Not a great correction.
Unless you can show that someone adulterated the product with the specific intent of causing death, it isn't. Causing someone to die through negligence, recklessness or indifference is manslaughter, not murder.
If I intend to enrich myself my taking all the money in an armored car and the deaths of the security guards I'll have to shoot my way through is just some side effect to me, not my intent by neither my concern, that's still murder.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/johnsona...
https://www.lawsuit-information-center.com/2-billion-verdict...
$200,000 per victim for knowingly being given cancer. Obscene. I think China executing people is much closer to justice than our system.
Jail and financial annihilation are basically the only ways to try to counterbalance the massive upside you can get from sociopathic behavior like this.
We need to start treating this more like fraud, but perpetrated as a form of violence.
Certainly a good system. If the hardest punishment is a fine, it becomes a fee for rich people.
Why? If you knowingly decide to poison thousands of people, that makes you a mass murderer. Since when are we so lenient about those?
I agree in principle that IF your country has the death sentence, there is no reason why it should not be applied in such cases as well. But I think death sentences are problematic. Put them in jail and bar them from ever running a company again. That should be enough.
But realize that list for whatever action would be done would be... very long. Monsanto, bunch of Wall street guys (if you trace actions to real consequences), this and probably many more. I think life sentence in maximum security prison in US would be actually worse.
Also, you soon hit grey area, say defense industry and its bribing of government to start wars that killed millions... where do you draw the line? One's man patriot is another's murderer
This is especially common for industries like mining which are guaranteed to require significant cleanup:
https://www.npr.org/2022/10/29/1127520991/west-virginia-coal...
https://www.propublica.org/article/west-virginia-coal-blackj...
Hasn’t that ship sailed recently? They were sued for damages and cleanup costs from PFAS and won, resulting in them not be liable?
No executives were actually executed. Only two people were executed, a farmer producing the protein powder with melamine and the manager of a workshop processing it. Sanlu executives got away with prison sentences.
Fear of escape and second life as an evil business exec? Eye for an eye morality? Understanding death to be a greater deterrent than life in a cage? (How do you reconcile that with the popularity of "death-by-cop"?)
China does not care so much about mistakes, they care about the deterrent effect.
Different ideologies on law enforcement.
Agreed, this has been studied over and over, generally punishment doesn't work. The reason it doesn't work is because most crimes are not planned or deliberate, especially not something like murder.
However, in cases like this, with 3M, it is deliberate. Sure they try to hide it, but they also know that the chances of anyone in management getting personally punished is practically zero. The company might get a fine and some executive will take an early retirement, if he hasn't already once the information comes to light. This is not a crime made in desperation, this is a cold blood calculation where the costs are weighed against potential profit. I don't know, but I could imagine a deterrence would work differently in these scenarios.
Most studies citing the inefficacy of the death penalty are flawed and simply at odds with reality, in which evidence points to the opposite of what the studies theorize.
Thank you for confirming my talking point.
I'm also somewhat skeptical on the idea that the death penalty _should_ cost more than life in prison (assuming that sentence carries at least 20 years for the remainder of that person's life.) It would seem to me that there is a fairly obvious problem there that needs to get worked out if it's actually true (has anyone looked closely at the studies that assert this claim? Obviously there's additional time in court, but it would seem preposterous that this would necessarily lead to an increase such that paying for someone's housing and supervision for 20+ years is cheaper than additional court time.) Obviously there are other factors like how the government allows itself to get overcharged by the company that manufactures the lethal injection for some strange reason (is it actually all that strange to anyone?) And then what is the actual reason for all the time prisoners spend on death row, this would seem to just be the state shooting itself in the foot on statistics for the costs for capital punishment?
Anyway, I'm generally for the death penalty in matters where there is a clear connection between one entity and an intentional large-scale loss of human life. Proving the intention and the connection are the hard parts, for sure. But the clear benefit to the death penalty is that it's a permanent act that would-be criminals would naturally try to avoid, potentially avoiding them becoming criminals at all. If you have a study that somehow refutes this theory, that would-be criminals, especially white collar criminals similar to officials at 3M here, don't consider punishments as a deterrence at all, I might revise my opinion.
I'm not an expert on this, but my understanding it's all the extra judicial processes that end up costing a lot. The cost of the poison used to kill the person (or bullet, or however it's done) it's probably just a rounding error in comparison.
(I'm against the death penalty, but if you're gonna have it, why invent these macabre Rube Goldberg contraptions for killing people? Just put the person up against a wall and shoot him, FFS.)
I would wager you're probably correct. One substantial cost for the death penalty seems to be just paying a public defender for that whole time because the average person on death row cannot afford their own representation. This would not be the case, however, for company executives in the context we're discussing here at least. I'm also curious if these studies accurately pull together all the costs for life imprisonment, such as the guard staff, infirmary staff, cost of food consumed, cost of clothing, etc. There are probably other costs associated with imprisonment that I'm not even aware of because I've been fortunate enough to avoid prison so far.
> ([...] why invent these macabre Rube Goldberg contraptions for killing people? Just put the person up against a wall and shoot him, FFS.)
On this, we agree. Frankly, I'm fine without the death penalty too, though I'm not certain that it's a fair and just punishment in every case, and I would assume the potential for capital punishment would be a major deterrence for people looking into committing "white collar" life-ending crimes.
Even low level criminals mentally distinguish themselves from the “really bad people.” In prison, the people who hurt children are reviled by the other criminals. When we impose the death penalty for certain conduct, we create a powerful social norm. The point is to help the majority of people who aren’t evil, but are flawed and fallible, stay on the right side of the line.
I’m not enthusiastic about that and would be fine jailing these guys for life, but if it’s something the state does I want guys in expensive suits to know it’s not just poor people.
You can think that, but you'd be wrong. Everyone who commits a crime thinks they're gonna be the one to get away with it.
It's a very popular opinion among certain kinds of people, but history and even present day has shown, time and again - You can't slaughter your way to a peaceful law-abiding society.
Boeing killed 500 people, they knew the plane was faulty, and they suffered no consequence.
Untill a CEO of a major corp or a bank thats 'too big to fail' spends a few years behind bars, this whole discussion is just some sort of fantasy revenge fap.
The problem with our relying on prison and financial punishments with corporate malfeasance is that a) rich people can "play the game" enough to get absurdly preferential treatment in the prison system, and b) the financial penalties are never truly scaled up to the life-ruining penalties most regular people might experience.
In the formula case, I'd rather see the executives condemned to physically serving the families of those affected, and having every asset they own liquefied and split between them.
https://web.archive.org/web/20091125173132/http://www.nydail...
Are you saying that’s fake?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/24/china-executes...
To be sure, a dairy farmer (Zhang Yujun) and milk salesman (Geng Jinping) were executed[1]. At the highest corporate levels, Sanlu general manager (Tian Wenhua) initially got life in prison...except she'll be released next year after 15 years.
No executives were executed in this scandal.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/24/china-executes...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Qiqihar_school_gymnasiu...
We had those a couple hundred years ago, then the monarchies lost their teeth and capitalism and democracy got all mixed up together.