> Or if someone takes an action knowing that it could crash an airliner with hundreds of people aboard, they should not be imprisoned?

If the risk is not excessive, my answer would be no. If the behavior is only realistically punishable when it actually results in an accident, then the answer would also be no.

I think that neither air travel nor chemical plants pose an excessively elevated risk to human lives right now, thus increasing punishments for infractions would be disproportionate, nto very helpful and potentially even detrimental for safety long-term.

Your analogy (beating someone with a tire iron) also clearly features intent; this is not typical for accidents and makes punishments less justifiable and much less useful.

If you actually want to make a strong case for increasing (shareholder) liability, it needs to be clear that those additional punishments and enforcement overhead would actually save lifes, and that very critical point is absolutely not obviouis to me right now.

> Or if someone takes an action knowing that it could crash an airliner with hundreds of people aboard, they should not be imprisoned?

The above was poorly worded. My apologies. Instead: if someone takes an action knowing that it could crash an airliner with hundreds of people aboard, and that airliner crashes, killing hundreds, they should not be imprisoned?

As for the rest, you are ignoring the modifiers "knowingly" and "making the cost/benefit analysis that paying fines/settlements will cost less than operating safely" and "knowingly and/or negligently putting others at risk of harm" and "willful, knowing negligence"

Why are you ignoring those qualifiers? Did you just miss them? Were they not placed prominently enough in my prose?

I'm not (and I explicitly said so) talking about accidents that are the result of bad luck or a relatively unforeseeable chain of events.

As I repeatedly said, I'm talking about willful, knowledgeable negligence and/or cutting corners knowing safety could be compromised and making conscious decisions to accept known risks of harm to people, property and/or the environment in pursuit of increased profit.

But you knew that, because I repeatedly said so. As such, why are you arguing with a strawman you set up rather than engaging with my actual statements?

A great example of what I'm talking about is the continued sale of HIV contaminated blood products by multiple pharmaceutical companies who knew their products were contaminated with HIV[0], were already selling products that were uncontaminated, but knowingly sold the contaminated products and thousands of hemophiliacs died slow, painful deaths from AIDS (including my brother in-law).

And (for the eighth or ninth time) that's the sort of thing I'm talking about.

Those pharmaceutical companies intentionally murdered thousands by knowingly selling contaminated blood products to people who needed those products to live -- even though they had uncontaminated products in inventory. They just wanted to make more money by infecting ~80% of US hemophiliacs and many more around the world.

Perhaps you'll claim it was just "poor process" or "deficient training" or something else equally ridiculous. But it wasn't any of those things. The pharma companies admitted doing so.

How many executives went to prison, or the companies had their charters revoked? Zero. That's the problem. That's the kind of behavior that literally screams for prison time and the corporate death penalty.

Do I need to provide eight or nine more examples before you'll stop being deliberately obtuse? You're being an apologist for sociopathic, murderous scum. For shame!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contaminated_haemophilia_blood...