Philips hid CPAP machine problems from FDA and patients for years

I'm saying that the executives making the decisions, and being compensated for the risk/responsibility (again, this is their own justification for exorbitant compensation), are at minimum just as criminally responsible as the much lower paid person that may make the original choice.

But it's also not a given that that the lower ranked (and paid) individual is the one who has liability - they may reasonably believe the material or product design is safe, because they don't have all the information the company as a whole has, and again, it's the job of the executives to ensure that all the information the company has is correctly considered and routed to the right people, and if that doesn't happen, then the responsibility is on the executives who failed to ensure that happened.

If the executives of a company have demonstrated that they will penalize people for raising safety concerns, they're definitionally taking full responsibility for any consequences of that, including a failure to do full safety analysis in the first place. Similarly if the executives approve employment contracts that include penalties for reporting safety concerns externally they're responsible (non-executive employees aren't likely being paid enough to afford a lawyer to determine whether or not such contract terms are legal, let alone being able to afford being laid off if they're wrong).

Finally, in this case, it's very clear Philips was aware of the problems with this device and intentionally hid that information, and I really don't think that was the decision of some random low level employee. Again, before you go and blame the low level employee, if they're just being told "this is not a real issue and is being overblown" how are they expected to know differently? The lower ranked/paid someone is the higher the perceived risk of asking "are you sure that's accurate?" or similarly rocking the boat. Obviously this is on a scale (don't explicitly put this in our safety notes vs destroy all the documents we have on this issue, the latter should trigger at least a "I'll confirm with legal the exact documents to destroy and CC you" from anyone). But again, if a company is in that position, or employees believe asking about safety issues can result in penalization or termination, that's due to the actions of the executives, and so again, they are liable for the outcome.

The model you're advocating is the mob model of 'I didn't explicitly say "poison someone", one of my associates misunderstood me and went too far, but I didn't break the law'

They are paid to be liable, and usually have the explicit authority to bind the company with their decisions (IE signing/etc authority). Part of the job is to be accountable for the decisions your organization makes, whether you made them personally or not. The buck stops here, so to speak.

This is intentional - in large companies actual responsibility for failure can be so diffuse that nobody would otherwise ever held accountable.

If you break down what happened here into pieces:

1. Root cause of problem

2. Responsibility for the problem

3. Accountability for the problem

4. What accountability looks like

This amounts to:

1 is "someone chose to use the wrong foam" for $reasons.

2 is whoever did that, probably not an exec. In large companies, or complex problems, responsibility can also be very spread out.

3 is what we are discussing - I would argue strongly that executives should be held civilly accountable for the decisions made by their organizations and criminally accountable for decisions made by their organization that they had direct knowledge of.

In general, execs usually are indemnified by the company for reasonable business decisions they make, so holding them civilly liable will not result in personal liabilty for them except to the degree they lied/hid/committed fraud, which is basically what you want.

4 i honestly have no idea what to do here.

you do not need to know everything about a thing to be responsible for it.

do you own a pet? if yes, are you a veterinarian? if no, how do you care for your pet if you can’t run a blood screen?

Because that's what your job is as a higher up. You direct stuff, which comes with the responsibility of the results of that directing. In exchange you have a lot of power and get paid handsomely.

It wasn't Dennis Muilenburg personally who coded the shitty unredudant software that made Boeing 737 Maxes crash themselves into the ground, but he was forced to resign nonetheless (even though he got a golden parachute so it was more of a reward than a punishment). It wasn't Vincent Van Quickenborne who personally didn't process the necessary paperwork that left a terrorist free in Belgium and allowed the later to murder people, but he took accountability and resigned.

There's a whole legal doctrine in international law when it comes to war crimes, called the command responsibility, where commanders are responsible for crimes committed by their subordinates (unless they're American, then they all get medals).