Doctors would kill for profit. Politicians would. The same for engineers, cookers. Any profession, activity or line of business really.
That's human nature. But not all humans. Not even majority, I'd say certainly.
The problem is that this small minority gets 99% of the news. Very rarely one hears when a CEO avoids a decision that could endanger someone. Or when a Doctor is honest and preserves the patient's health above all.
It doesn't mean these good things aren't happening all the time. Look at your life and remember: how many people could have done harm to you for a profit? How many do you remember actually doing it?
Some corporations aren't in a situation where killing people is profitable.
But every corporation will come across situations where harming people is profitable, and if they don't harm people in that situation, one of their competitors will.
People like Yvonne Chounard who manage to avoid unethical practices AND create a profitable company are the exception, not the rule, and he was aware of that, which is why he went to great lengths creating an atypical corporate management structure to try to preserve the ethics of Patagonia in his absence.
> Doctors would kill for profit. Politicians would. The same for engineers, cookers. Any profession, activity or line of business really.
> That's human nature. But not all humans. Not even majority, I'd say certainly.
You're fundamentally not understanding what I'm saying.
It's not the doctors I'm worried about. Doctors have to look their patients in the eye usually.
It's not the cooks I'm worried about, because they're generally poor, and don't have the means to avoid regulation.
It's not the engineers I'm worried about, because they generally don't get paid more if their work kills people (with the exception of those in the manufacturing of weapons). In fact, it's often engineers that are the whistleblowers saying "we told them what was wrong and they did it anyway" when the decision is made to do something dangerous.
And if you think the majority of politicians won't kill to keep power, please tell me what country you are in so I can move there. I can only think of a handful of elected politicians at the federal US level who aren't obvious de-facto murderers.
The people I'm worried about the most are the C-level execs, board members, and majority shareholders: the kind of people who can put a numerical value on what it will cost to not kill people, and then justify it to themselves and never have to look their victims or their victims' families in the eye.
Perhaps no, but a corporation has no compunctions about killing for profit. Let's take the direct approach, and list some that will take money and a target list, and make those people dead for you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_private_military_contr...
Here's a list of companies in the USA who will sell you the tools you need to kill people at scale:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_defense_...
But I think that's not exactly what we're talking about, we're talking more about how the corporate entity under this current system shields organizations of people from the deaths their decisions cause.
GM knowingly let people die due to a defect in their vehicles that they were aware of: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/why-did-gm-t...
PG&E was found culpable for the pipeline rupture that killed 8 people and destroyed 38 homes in San Bruno in 2010, because they ignored inspection data.
An article came out a few weeks ago about how immigrant child laborers are being killed in shocking volumes in American factories https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2024/feb/12/i...
Here's a fun that goes through a bit of the history of corporations killing people directly (murdering trade unionists) and indirectly (tobacco companies suppressing research). https://jacobin.com/2020/01/corporations-profit-values-murde...
There's something uniquely devilish about the corporation in our current legal and economic system.
Corporations don't do anything, the people in them do.
People working at GM didn't act to fix their vehicles and people died.
People at PG&E chose not to perform actions based upon inspection data, and people died when their infrastructure failed.
According to your Jacobin article, people at Coca Cola killed those trade unionists.
How about let's not let the legal wrapper for people protect those who murder others?
But a big part of why that isn't happening is that when people kill people from behind the shield of a corporation, we can't even get people to agree that anything should be done about it, because "they were just following incentives". And any attempt to change the incentives is met with "but how can they do business if they're expected to comply with these onerous regulations" or "but that's socialism!". Instead, we're just supposed to trust that if it made money for a corporation it must have been good, because the invisible hand of the market would never allow it to be otherwise.
Until we break the idea that corporations are good by default, it's going to be hard to persuade people that going after people within a corporation for their wrongdoing is a good idea.
Which country are we talking about?
It seems like you're trying to make the argument that some companies don't need a rule against murder because they wouldn't commit murder, but that's absurd. It isn't unfair to have a rule against murder apply to a company that wouldn't commit murder. That's just how rules work, and if you have to pretend you don't understand that, I start to think you're just grasping at straws to try to justify being against a rule against murder for companies.
If you're generally against economic regulation for companies, you might correctly point out that companies committing murder is a pretty extreme example, and most regulations aren't against such extremes. But that's missing the point. The situation is that extreme; people within corporations are committing murders and the corporations are receiving, at best, slap on the wrist fines or civil settlements that only affect shareholders and rarely affect the decision-makers who committed murder. No matter how anti-regulation you are, surely we can agree that "we can't have a rule against murder" is too little regulation?
