I guess the question is when does accountability stop? If a company and its descendant employees and products are built on an evil foundation and benefit from it, how do we rectify as a society? Ford is hardly alone here, many German, Japanese, and American companies were built on wartime atrocities and exist today from that previous goodwill. If the malignant founder is dead, is then the rest of the machine exempt from responsibility?
I personally think the only way to be truly principled is to boycott basically everything. I imagine the vast majority of people reading this right now are wearing clothes produced by child slavery or eating imported products that clear cut rainforest and villages or whatnot. Society for better or worse has to carry some amount of baggage to just subsist without emotional stress.
I agree, and I've long thought that there is no such thing as a clean dollar. I could donate $100 to an animal shelter, and some % of that will eventually make its way into evil hands. But I'd make that trade-off because the money is being used more for good than bad, and the bad part is largely out of my control.
Musk's wealth is however causing very direct and obvious harm to causes I care about, and he uses his platform of 100M+ followers to spread hateful views which now permeate every conversation. I am tired of him being relevant. There are many alternatives to Tesla so it is easy enough to not give him money.
I also take a forward-facing view. I can't change what people's past dollars were spent on. Instead I care about what my dollars be spent on after I give them to a company. I buy Porsche cars today even though their founder was a Nazi and the company is still majority-owned by the Porsche family. But their founder is dead, and today's Porsche has strongly disavowed Nazi views. Seems my money mostly goes toward developing cool cars while the owners stay out of politics.
> I guess the question is when does accountability stop? If a company and its descendant employees and products are built on an evil foundation and benefit from it, how do we rectify as a society? Ford is hardly alone here, many German, Japanese, and American companies were built on wartime atrocities and exist today from that previous goodwill. If the malignant founder is dead, is then the rest of the machine exempt from responsibility?
Corporations aren't people. Yes, I understand the supreme court rulings on this subject, I'm saying the supreme court is wrong.
Each person in a corporation is responsible for their own actions.
This is a very big problem in our society. A more recent Ford misdeed, the Pinto, was rushed through production despite 40+ crash tests in which the fuel tanks ruptured in every test. People knew it would kill people, did it anyway because they could make more money by letting people die, and shareholders were the ones punished. This is an injustice: the people who pushed through the Pinto committed at the very least manslaughter, and have as far as I can tell, never even been named publicly.
Until we address this problem we're going to keep having these problems. GM in 2014 refused to replace faulty ignition switches which ignited, killing 13 people. The car industry is littered with bodies, but these faults are not limited to automotive companies. In 2010 PG&E refused to fix known problems with a gas line and it exploded, leveling 38 homes. It's a miracle that Boeing hasn't killed someone yet. And this is setting aside simple safety neglect: letting people die isn't just a small cost-cutting measure for healthcare companies, it's a core part of their business model.
These decisions are not made by corporations, they are made by individuals, and as long as we continue to punish corporations for individual decisions, while letting literal murderers move on to the next job, this will keep happening. We need to hold individuals, not corporations, accountable.
Unfortunately, a lot of the people with money and power don't want to be held accountable, and have crafted a legal and propaganda system that avoids that. So until that changes we have Luigi Mangione and tanking Tesla stock--actual justice isn't an option we've been given.
The 737-MAX killed 346 people. Which reinforces your point rather than taking away from it. In any sane world the CEO should have gone to prison for that, but instead he walked away with $62 million.
I guess the question is when does accountability stop? If a company and its descendant employees and products are built on an evil foundation and benefit from it, how do we rectify as a society? Ford is hardly alone here, many German, Japanese, and American companies were built on wartime atrocities and exist today from that previous goodwill. If the malignant founder is dead, is then the rest of the machine exempt from responsibility?
I personally think the only way to be truly principled is to boycott basically everything. I imagine the vast majority of people reading this right now are wearing clothes produced by child slavery or eating imported products that clear cut rainforest and villages or whatnot. Society for better or worse has to carry some amount of baggage to just subsist without emotional stress.