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| ▲ | cluckindan 21 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You’re debating the difference between criminal intent to negligently harm and criminal intent to harm. There is not really much difference from the perspective of those harmed, is there? | | |
| ▲ | avazhi 21 hours ago | parent [-] | | What does their perspective have to do with whether the distinction is real or not? It's a matter of logic and also a matter of what is most likely to be true. The language used is obviously in relation to the rather important legal dichotomy between those two things; victims of PFAS toxicity and their opinions are irrelevant. What does matter is what the executives and people making the decisions at the corporations knew, thought, and intended by doing certain things, like covering up studies that demonstrated the harms, continuing to ship products they suspected were harmful, or suing whistleblowers to keep them quiet about putative harms. The original commenter was insinuating (I've quoted it throughout this thread) that the corporations were intentionally poisoning people, as if making them sick was itself a motive for shipping these products. Whether that is true or not is to be determined from the mental state of the executives I just talked about. There is no evidence I've ever seen that any of the corporations, like Dupont or Marlboro, ever intended to poison people and give them diseases for some underlying profit motive. To suggest they had was, as I said, lazy thinking and a caricature. That certainly doesn't mean those corporations weren't negligent. But, as has been my point this entire time, intention is everything - intention is literally the entire difference between a murder charge and a manslaughter charge. It's not trivial at all. And imputing intention to cause harm (ie., the opposite of using Occam's Razor) because you dislike a corporation or person is just sloppy thinking. |
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| ▲ | magicalist 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > But there was no evidence that they used PFAS in order to make people sick, which is what the original commenter said No, the said > If companies can freely poison everyone, profits go up Which has played out again and again in history. It's a lot cheaper to dump industrial solvents out the back door than pay for proper disposal, and if there's no legal repercussions stopping it, someone can just do it and watch profits go up. | | |
| ▲ | avazhi 21 hours ago | parent [-] | | > or they want people to get sick and die. Actually this is what he said, and what I was referring to. | | |
| ▲ | vouwfietsman 21 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Its not what you quoted, and its also still not supporting your point (it starts with or, maybe there's something before the or?). | |
| ▲ | californical 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Isn’t “doing something that causes people to get sick and die for your own small financial gain” exactly that? | | |
| ▲ | avazhi 21 hours ago | parent [-] | | If I run a business that produces pollution through a pair of smokestacks, and I know that the pollution is harmful and will give a few of the surrounding residents lung cancer, is that the same thing as intending that they will get the cancer? Or would it be reasonable for me to see the harm as an unfortunate externality that I wish could be avoided but can't be given whatever technological limitations there are currently. So no, it's not 'exactly that'. You guys hate corporations so much that you are going a step beyond mere negligence and pretending that they are actually out to harm people as the very raison d'etre for their products, as opposed to the harm being a byproduct of their business. I'm not saying PFAS should be legal (they definitely shouldn't be); I'm saying it's lazy thinking that lacks evidence to suggest the harm itself is somehow the motivation, which is what the original commenter suggested. Do you guys also think all the old asbestos manufacturers hoped/intended that their miners and others working with their sheeting would get mesothelioma? | | |
| ▲ | vouwfietsman 19 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I'm not sure why you keep spinning this as a valid response to anything. This is the full quote of the parent:
> As for people getting sick and dying, they either don’t care, or they want people to get sick and die. Lets break it down. Lets say some of your actions are causing harm, there's basically three options:
1. you don't know this is happening
2. you know, but continue because you don't care, and you can make money not caring
3. you know, and somehow this is beneficial to you, unlikely but possible (The default option, which is always available, is to stop operations, which they have obviously also not done.) Since DuPont obviously knew this was causing harm, #1 is out, so #2 and #3 remain. This is just deduction by elimination, not a value judgement. No amount of spinning this argument is going to change this. I think your last line here makes it obvious who's straw-manning. | |
| ▲ | californical 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > You guys hate corporations so much Sorry I don’t know who you’re grouping me with, but I don’t hate corporations. I hate people intentionally harming others for their own profit. > Do you guys also think all the old asbestos manufacturers hoped/intended that their miners and others working with their sheeting would get mesothelioma? Again, not speaking for a group here since I’m just some guy. But I think when evidence started to appear that “holy crap this is killing people like crazy”, then choosing to allow it to continue - yes is equivalent to killing people intentionally. I don’t consider “disguising your killing through statistics” to be a reasonable defense. If I have 100 miners that I’ve hired in a room, and I know that 10 of them will die as a direct result of my actions, such as not taking precautionary safety measures… It doesn’t matter which 10 it is, I’ve still chosen to kill 10 of those people. |
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