Earlier quoted context omitted.
>That's like saying car manufacturers need to be charged for offloading automotive deaths on society. Devil's advocate but why shouldn't they? At the end of the day _someone_ has to bear that cost, why should we force society at large to deal with issues that arise as a result of a small group of people finding a new way to enrich themselves?
> Devil's advocate but why shouldn't they? Because they aren't making the choices that result in the deaths. If you force the industry to pay for the negative externalities of the industry, the fixes/costs can be baked into the product ( e.g. , safety equipment, emissions standards). If you force the industry to pay for things that are the result of government ( e.g. overly-permissive licensing standards, building la…
>Because they aren't making the choices that result in the deaths.
I've yet to see compelling evidence that "free will" actually exists, I think it's just a convenient moral abstraction we've developed to grease the wheels of the world. Supposing it doesn't exist, how could we make a just high-functioning society? One that recognizes my hypothesis regarding the illlegitimacy of absolute individual responsibility while also resulting in equal or better collective behavior?
Going back towards the car example, I don't think hammer manufacturers should bear responsibility for the apocryphal homicidal misuse of their tools since removing a hammer from a toolbox just means the crime would be committed with a knife or rocks in a sock. This argument gets blurrier when you consider firearms manufacturers where the explicit intent of the tool is often to kill. You can make a solid argument either way there.
So what about cars? They are involved in roughly 100 fatalities a day in the united states. Were cars designed to kill? No (although we do have the case where a manufacturer decided it was cheaper to keep selling unsafe cars and just pay out lawsuits rather than fix their screwup). Manufacturers generally do what they can to make them safer with each passing year. Despite that though, society still has to bear the cost of tens of thousands of deaths per year and two orders of magnitude more injuries. Those injuries, fatal and nonfatal, would _not_ have happened in a world without cars. A portion of them would not have happened without car ads and popular culture that makes driving fast and irresponsibly look cool. It's convenient, sure, to place absolute blame on the people who don't think just watch cool car go zoom in tv then buy cool car on credit and go zoom into building. Doing what we do now and removing those people from society at that point is a viable solution, but what if we put more effort into not letting industrial psychologists develop good little consumers like that in the first place? The US is the "land of the free" with high levels of individual responsibility and we've got astronomical household debt and the world's highest proportion of our population incarcerated to show for it. I think we can do better.