4 ms·

I'm not sure if I agree with you or not so I'm going to play devil's advocate. Corporations in and of themselves can't make decisions. Plus, if a corporation

by j_baker 16y ago

I'm not sure if I agree with you or not so I'm going to play devil's advocate. Corporations in and of themselves can't make decisions. Plus, if a corporation were to receive the "death penalty" you're suggesting, it could be as bad for us as it is for the company (in terms of lost jobs, competition, etc). Why does the corporation need to be held responsible for something like this? Why not hold the employees behind these incidents accountable?

nooneelse 16y ago
Why not hold only the particular neurons responsible for a crime accountable?
- houseabsolute 16y ago
  If that were possible, I'm sure that's exactly what we would do.
  - nooneelse 16y ago
    If you take a cog out of a machine because it broke (couldn't take the pressure exerted on it or some such) and replace it with a nearly identical one... why think that one will last any better? Corporations intentionally structure themselves with the goal that the people in most roles can be replaceable with minimum impact on the company performance. It is odd to only look at the lower level units that are used to build a system and ignore the possibility of structural, system-level issues or pathologies.
    - houseabsolute 16y ago
      When you open the machine up, you're going to check which parts are causing it to break, not just which parts are broken. You'll fix those parts of the machine as well, to carry on the analogy. Not that any of this is going to happen in real life. But as long as we're speculating . . .
anigbrowl 16y ago
Corporations are held to be capable of engaging in political speech; so to the extent that they can enjoy the benefits of legal personhood, I see no reason why they should be able to offload the responsibilities of same onto their individual officers. I agree that a corporation lacks an actual brain, nervous system and so on, but in practice we treat the collective decisions of the board as equivalent.

by j_baker 16y ago

nooneelse 16y ago

Why not hold only the particular neurons responsible for a crime accountable?

houseabsolute 16y ago
If that were possible, I'm sure that's exactly what we would do.
- nooneelse 16y ago
  If you take a cog out of a machine because it broke (couldn't take the pressure exerted on it or some such) and replace it with a nearly identical one... why think that one will last any better? Corporations intentionally structure themselves with the goal that the people in most roles can be replaceable with minimum impact on the company performance. It is odd to only look at the lower level units that are used to build a system and ignore the possibility of structural, system-level issues or pathologies.
  - houseabsolute 16y ago
    When you open the machine up, you're going to check which parts are causing it to break, not just which parts are broken. You'll fix those parts of the machine as well, to carry on the analogy. Not that any of this is going to happen in real life. But as long as we're speculating . . .

anigbrowl 16y ago

Corporations are held to be capable of engaging in political speech; so to the extent that they can enjoy the benefits of legal personhood, I see no reason why they should be able to offload the responsibilities of same onto their individual officers. I agree that a corporation lacks an actual brain, nervous system and so on, but in practice we treat the collective decisions of the board as equivalent.