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Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

Death sentence is probably a bit much, but if management takes actions that they know will kill or maim I don't see a reason why punishment shouldn't be the same as if you went out and hit someone with a hammer.

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.

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I read once about a corporate death penalty that I think should really be made into law: where a corporate entity commits something so heinous that a fine or what have you is simply not enough. I cannot find the link but the process would go about such as:

- 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.

Sounds like a gift to short sellers.

Allowing fraud is a gift to speculators just as much. And criminals.

Wouldn’t this reduce the share price, effectively baking in the externality risk?

It would reduce the share price of companies that shareholders thought were at high risk of committing a major crime, and create an incentive for companies that care about their share price to make it very clear that they weren't going to do crime and e.g. have policies to prevent it.

Nationalising the corporation would delist it from an exchange, preventing stock sales.

Meaning short sellers never have to buy it back.

That seems like the correct incentive, no? If the shorts believe a company is (e.g.) poisoning 100,000 people in a large suburb, shouldn't they profit massively if the government agrees and seizes it?

It should be. The entire job of short sellers is to be incentivized to ferret out bad companies.

> The entire entity would be taken on ownership by the government agency

We should not trust government agencies as they have zero accountability either. It is even worse.

But this doesn't solve the problem in any way.

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.

Unfortunately the companies manage to wriggle out of all liability by saying they are bankrupt or transferring to a new company structure.

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.

Something like a real solution is to create a way to reintroduce personal liability for executive teams in cases like this where extraordinary harm is done. Human beings need to have their own assets and personal well being at risk, otherwise the incentives for perpetrating mass pollution are too lucrative.

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.

I completely agree

So if I want to legally murder people I can do it if I create corporation and create a plausible deniable way of killing them? Cool.

Certainly a good system. If the hardest punishment is a fine, it becomes a fee for rich people.

I don’t think death sentence is actually a bit much here.

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.

For me, the death penalty contains traces of mercy and life-long incarceration does not. You take away someone’s freedom for the rest of their life instead of putting them out of their misery.

I agree with you on death penalty but the parent also says removal of all assets.

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.

Couple that with impossibility to be ignorant of what happens inside of a company, because if not, top level management has a big incentive to have a buffer to keep them purposedly unknowing of this kind of doings.

> I don’t know if the law will allow an effective removal of all assets. I’m thinking of trust fund babies and such…

Civil asset forfeiture. The money itself is complicit in the criminal act.

The quality of that extended life is probably something that needs to be accounted for too.

"Plush mansion, good company, etc" vs "left to rot in a hole" type of thing.

TBH I'm not much interested in `Punishment`, so long incarceration does not interest me personally.

You suggest vile acts should be permitted without consequence?

Consequences and punishment are different concepts, I support the death penalty in the case of egregious acts primarily from the perspective of cost and efficiency of removing an unacceptable risk to society.

I don’t need to see them tortured beforehand, as it serves little to no purpose (in my opinion).

Basically this.

Then why not make the death penalty an option for the condemned? They could choose between life in prison or an execution in a form of their choosing if they wish to be put out of their misery.

“It’s your choice, but the daily beatings will continue until you consent to your own execution.”

> life-long incarceration does not

There is no such thing as life long incarceration. They always get out early

Maybe not in your jurisdiction...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_imprisonment_in_England_a...

Murder can also be premeditated. In many cases, proof of premeditation is required for "Murder One".

> Death sentence is probably a bit much

Why? If you knowingly decide to poison thousands of people, that makes you a mass murderer. Since when are we so lenient about those?

Most countries in the world have abolished the death penalty, for good reason.

How is that working out for you?

Some places don't execute mass murderers either. There are plenty of arguments around this. For example, based on the crime rates in places with death sentences, I'm not sure it provides as strong a disincentive you think it does.

Because undoing a death sentence if it turns out the culpit was one level higher in the corporate chain is pretty hard.

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 they're in suits! (nah joking burn them in hell, they are all bunch of power hungry sociopaths, normal folks wouldn't survive a day among such C-suites due to being decent human beings).

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

You can start by the most obvious cases. For the rest long term prison will work as an intermediate as well as complete bankruptcy of said individual.

You can't "sell the company". Any company you sell with an immediate and complete change of management is very likely completely dead in the water. Institutional knowledge is very important.

At least six babies were killed; that's mass murder. It was done in cold blood, planned out ahead of time. The death penalty was the only fitting sentence.

The death penalty is never a fitting sentence. Prosecutors and judges can make mistakes. Executing someone is something you can never undo.

There are plenty of crimes that deserve death. We don’t impose it because we’re unsure about culpability. But if you did it, you do indeed deserve to die.

>There are plenty of crimes that deserve death.

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?

I don’t support it because it’s irrevocable, but that’s the reason to oppose it. Some crimes do deserve it, even if we don’t impose it every time.

i'll get behind the death penalty once we get that 100% accurate justice system i've been waiting on.

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.

>that's mass murder.

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.

They knew what they were doing would kill people and did it anyway with that knowledge. The fact that their motivation was profit instead of the deaths doesn't make it 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.

I have to disagree if someone knowingly poisoned my baby then if death penalty isn’t imposed I’m going to attempt to get revenge myself. The death penalty was probably effective at calming the entire country from rage.

I think, as a general principle, justice should not be based around appeasing a potential lynch mob.

There's lynch mob, and then there's righteous rage at acts so heinous that lack of punishment would call into question the legitimacy of the entire social structure.

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.

I don't think that's restricted to parents: I've felt that way since I was ten years old. That doesn't mean we have to kill the perpetrators: just remove them.

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”?

I mostly agree with you. I suppose I missed one important part in my comment - intent. A surviving pilot may not be blamed for a plane crash and associated deaths for merely being at fault. But I bet the story would be different if they did this intentionally, or intentionally allowed it to happen - we'd be talking murder / terrorism charges.

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.

> A surviving pilot may not be blamed for a plane crash and associated deaths for merely being at fault.

> 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.

Fair enough.

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.

In arguing against the death penalty for this, I was also missing the point: the criminal justice system is not the place for prevention, only retrospective (attempted) remedies. We should be thinking about how to restructure the system that makes white-collar mass murder (corporate homicide) possible.

(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.

It's ironic. Elsewhere today[0], I wrote about the problems where the correct take kind of ruins the mood of the argument, which is why the discourse keeps spinning in circles. With you spelling out the missing point, I realized this has happened to me here: of course this is a hard, systemic issue. But talking about death penalty let me conveniently forget about it for a moment, and feel like there's a simple solution. Which of course there is not.

So thanks for that bucket of cold water :).

[0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38674263

That was you? I wouldn't have made the observation had I not read that comment!

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.

I'm up for it, though off the top of my head, I'm not sure how to make it the right size - short enough to be useful, but longer than "1) learn about feedback loops, 2) think in dynamic systems, not static ones, 3) meditate on “Meditations on Moloch”".

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.

Moloch things are solvable. They're a relatively recent issue. The despairing tone of Scott Alexander's essay only applies because it assumes we've got an unlimited number of people – but we've got an unknown, finite, and small number of people. That puts the game closer in nature to the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, where you don't even need superrationality for the best decision to be "cooperate / cooperate".

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).

If there's never any real justice, some sort of correction needs to occur.

I think this is naive. Selling off a large company like this is not smart, think about it for a minute. First, who owns 3M (I own a handful of shares for example). Average shareholders will get screwed. Then think about who will buy their assets (IP and manufacturing). Will it be foreign companies? What will the contracts for medical supplies look like for like? Companies that discover they are doing harm will be incentivized to bury, lie, and hide. It’s not that simple,

What J&J tried is called the Texas two-step: they fold the liability into a subsidiary, which relocates to another state and declares bankruptcy. This has failed for that specific case but that is not a given.

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...

> In this case, force 3M to pay for everything

Hasn’t that ship sailed recently? They were sued for damages and cleanup costs from PFAS and won, resulting in them not be liable?

I dunno, if there's no money left, the execs can live in a cell where they are fed the various tainted products, but not told which.

Death sentence is absolutely not too much. It's an extraordinarily effective deterrent (see Singapore), and I don't know where the narrative comes from that it's not. Some people simply need to die.

Feels weird to get into a high-school debate about capital punishment here, but in essence:

(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.

(a) Sometimes the wrong people get put in prison or solitary confinement for life too, which is effectively decades-long torture. It is arbitrary to draw the line at the death penalty, which generally causes less suffering. (Read statements from prisoners in lifelong solitary confinement.)

(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."

>which is effectively decades-long torture

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.

Killing innocent people is wrong, killing murderers is good. Therefore we should give accused murderers fair trials before executing them.

> Therefore we should give accused murderers fair trials before executing them.

There are many examples of accused murderers who received fair trials, were convicted, and yet were still innocent.

As 'xvector points out, the alternative punishment - like long sentences in high-security facilities - can, in practice, be much, much worse. This is a theory vs. practice thing - theory could say that "there's always a chance", but actual numbers will say that the country is just making convicts - guilty and innocent alike - spend decades being tortured.

It's far more likely that we can fix prisons than we can fix the judicial system to guarantee that only the guilty are convicted.

Corporate crimes tend to be well documented. Even the communist Chinese can get these sort of convictions right. They did good work killing those bastards.

What kind of person? Regular millionaire/billionaire who know that they easily can get away with such decision using their wealth and/or power.

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.

Let me rephrase then: What is wrong in the brain of these people? They have to live on the planet too, they have friend and family, people they care... No?

Normal people can't get away with things like this, because the decisions would haunt our dreams.

I'm not sure.

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?

I dove into the science of psychopathy a few years ago after a family incident where my father imploded his life and much of the family's through self-destructive activities and there is actually a bunch of smart people studying the neuroscience of pyschopaths.

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-...

Which is why abnormal people are drawn to this kind of power.

You could apply the same argument to normal people. Normal people eat meat, which causes incredible, extreme amounts of torture and suffering to over 70 billion land animals per year.

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.

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