To put this in a more tangible context. A person getting 100 000 USD in annual income, being fined 50k for being criminally negligent, causing provable harm (say they injured several children by driving into a playground while drunk). 50k is big, but not huge.
In this metaphor, its more like they injured several children by driving into a playground while drunk, then woke up the next day and did it again. And again. And again. And carried on doing so for years. While somehow profiting off their playground rampages.
And then got one 50k fine a few years down the line.
The analogy is slightly off tho, J&J does not only do talc, it's a huge conglomerate.
IMO it's a sizeable enough amount to affect the company for a while, but I think it's unlikely it will prevent the same issues forever, simply because people in the company change and the underlying incentives are not influenced by a single event like this.
Edit: what I meant is that it the analogy would be like "this dishonest bit I did for this marginal extra income screwed my whole income"
I think this is ignoring the criminal part of criminal negligence. A crime was committed, innocent people got hurt. Justice isn’t served by merely nullifying the venture in a capital sense. No, a true justice punishes the responsible by stripping away their freedom. In a corporate sense this means taking away all your corporate profits way beyond what your little venture would have given you, imprisoning the people responsible (including CEOs), and even disbanding the whole company if the crime is severe enough.
I’ll make another ill guided attempt at an analogy. If J&J was a criminal gang, and decided to venture into a new smuggling scheme. Then got caught, but as a punishment, they only had to pay a portion of their annual profits in a fine, but people would consider it huge because it was way bigger than what this smuggling scheme would have given them. Additionally no bosses were imprisoned.
A true justice system shouldn’t treat a malicious company any differently than a criminal gang.
> I’ll make another ill guided attempt at an analogy. If J&J was a criminal gang, and decided to venture into a new smuggling scheme. Then got caught, but as a punishment, they only had to pay a portion of their annual profits in a fine, but people would consider it huge because it was way bigger than what this smuggling scheme would have given them. Additionally no bosses were imprisoned.
I can’t tell what you’re trying to say. If people consider it huge, that means it’s a good punishment, no?
> I think this is ignoring the criminal part of criminal negligence. A crime was committed, innocent people got hurt. Justice isn’t served by merely nullifying the venture in a capital sense. No, a true justice punishes the responsible by stripping away their freedom. In a corporate sense this means taking away all your corporate profits way beyond what your little venture would have given you, imprisoning the people responsible (including CEOs), and even disbanding the whole company if the crime is severe enough.
Putting thousands of people out work because a small segment of a business did a bad thing isn’t wise
What makes a good punishment is a pretty massive debate within philosophy. I’m of the opinion that you can easily tell that a punishment is too lax when the victims, the near community around the victims, and/or a large majority of the society in which the victims or the perpetrators reside, that if none of these get a sense of justice from the punishment, than the punishment is insufficient. A company paying a portion of their annual profit over two decades for knowingly risking cancer onto their customers probably fails every single of these groups.
> Putting thousands of people out work because a small segment of a business did a bad thing isn’t wise
This is a hyperbole. Courts can split up companies, they can remove leaderships, they can confiscate the stocks, heck, if you are so worried about the workers, perhaps you should ask your legislator to introduce a law where a malicious company can be ordered to reorganize as a coop and given to the workers.
> This is a hyperbole. Courts can split up companies, they can remove leaderships, they can confiscate the stocks, heck, if you are so worried about the workers, perhaps you should ask your legislator to introduce a law where a malicious company can be ordered to reorganize as a coop and given to the workers.
I’m confused how you can accuse me of hyperbole for stating that putting thousands of workers out of work is bad while it was you that suggesting disbanding the company for big enough crimes.
Splitting up a company isn’t really a punishment. Probably good for competition though.
Taking away stock is just a fine.
Reorganizing as a coop is just kind of dumb.
> A company paying a portion of their annual profit over two decades for knowingly risking cancer onto their customers probably fails every single of these groups.
How about 2,000x the annual revenue generated from the activity?
> How about 2,000x the annual revenue generated from the activity?
No. Companies should not be allowed to do crime, and the punishment should be proportional to the harm they caused, not to the revenue hypothesized by the scheme.
A crime syndicate does not have to pay 2000 times the amount they would have gained by smuggling drugs, no their mules go to jail, their CEO is hunted down by the military, and their whole organization is disbanded. Nobody cares about the workers in this instance (I wonder why).
> Reorganizing as a coop is just kind of dumb.
Yeah, Well, You know, that’s just like, your opinion, man.
> No. Companies should not be allowed to do crime, and the punishment should be proportional to the harm they caused, not to the revenue hypothesized by the scheme.
It is proportional to the harm. And it is a massive multiplier over the amount earned by the scheme. If JJ only did Talc, they would be dead many hundreds of times over. But Talc is a tiny sliver of what they do. So they happen to be large enough to survive a massive blow from their talc operations.
Think about what you’re saying. It does not make any sense. You seem to be upset mostly that JJ still exists. Which is only true because they are large and diverse in many products that are completely unrelated to the line of business that caused the problem.
> A crime syndicate does not have to pay 2000 times the amount they would have gained by smuggling drugs, no their mules go to jail, their CEO is hunted down by the military, and their whole organization is disbanded. Nobody cares about the workers in this instance (I wonder why).
Because those workers are criminals, not office workers and factory workers, the vast majority of whom are ordinary Americans doing normal, productive, legal jobs that are unrelated to the fact that talc had asbestos.
As pointed out by a sibling comment, income is revenue, not profit. So it's as if a person who makes $100K got to write off the $85K they spent on rent and other expenses, and was fined half of the $15K they had left.
On the one hand yes, but it's hard to do a direct comparison between companies and people. J&J is 100k+ people combined.
Punitive damages for companies do feel out of wack though.
If a person commits a felony like that, they're thrown in prison, prevented from making any income for years, and then (in the US at least) prevented from making any good income for the rest of their lives due to our draconian restrictions on ex felons.
If a company does similar, then... the company itself is often just fine, especially if they're a big/rich enough company.
