Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 1. Held accountable how? 2. Toward what end? In the case of the Nazis, the answers are 1. Executed. 2. Justice. For Facebook, I think executions should be off the table, but the second answer is the same. Facebook's engineers aren't gods, I get that. Knowing their engineers aren't gods, Facebook proceeded to use them to create imperfect but profitable systems anyway. Systems they knew or should have known would har…
Again, I view this as a passive voice excusing of responsibility for direct political action in exactly the same way that some people view "the algorithm" as a passive voice excusing of responsibility. The president pro tempore of the US senate was a Segrationist in 2001. Literally, segregationists of the US Senate outlived pets.com If any component of your blame or solution to the state of western politics includes…
You are mistaken. Neither intentionalists nor functionalists excuse the responsibility of anybody, least of all the organization's leadership. To both, the organization and its leaders are to be held responsible for the actions of the organization. The functionalist model does not absolve anybody of guilt.
If you want to see the hazard of demanding proof of intention, look no further than the travesty of justice that occurred in the wake of Enron. Every last Enron executive should have been jailed, but prosecutors had a hell of a time getting any of them convicted of anything because of this misguided obsession with proving intent. And nobody from Arthur Anderson went to prison, for the same reason.
Obsession with intent allows the guilty to trot out the "we didn't mean for this to happen, we're all just idiots." excuse. Without a smoking gun email, that excuse is hard to conclusively disprove. The antidote to that is strict liability; saying that their intentions are irrelevant and punishing them anyway.
Reminder, this is my point: "When software goes wrong, the company that decided to create and operate that software for profit is responsible for whatever negative impact that software might have, regardless of whether these problems were foreseen."