1. The executives know that chemicals are poisonous to wildlife, plants and humans

2. The executives don’t care because proper disposal would be costly and they are heavily incentivized to increase profits as much as possible

3. Executives order chemicals to be dumped or vented into the environment

4. Company gets caught

5. Executives order a coverup

6. Company eventually pays for cleanup, but the executives are already long gone

7. Nobody goes to jail

What part of this scenario is not intentionally poisoning people?

▲

avazhi 21 hours ago | parent [-]

> or they want people to get sick and die.

This is the part I've been referring to from the original comment.

Also, once again, you should be careful how you use intention here. Even in the case where they knew about the harms or the risk, you can't impute intention without more evidence. Without that evidence, you should stick to negligence, since that's what it would be and indeed that is what separates a simple negligence claim from criminal negligence (intention).

If you say they intended to harm people or the environment, that's very different from saying their negligence or coverup resulted in harm to people/the environment. Intention is a subjective state of mind of the executives/board/'The company', and while it can be imputed in certain circumstances, it's a high bar. Dumping toxic waste somewhere because you think nobody will ever notice (which they did, in remote bodies of water), and then having some campers come along and jump into the water for a swim (which also happened), doesn't mean they intended to harm those campers or indeed that they intended to harm anyone. It was negligent but not obviously intentional. This really isn't hard to understand. It's also why there were never any criminal charges, not because the execs were long gone. In the US, corporations can be held criminally liable regardless of whether the original execs are still there or not.

▲

californical 21 hours ago | parent [-]

> you can't impute intention without more evidence

If I’m aware that eating too much chocolate will kill my dog.

But it’s annoying for me to get up and walk to the trash can.

So I just throw the chocolate scraps to my dog to avoid inconveniencing myself.

Is this the same as wanting my dog to die? Being completely unbothered by the fact that I’m killing my dog sounds about equivalent to wanting it to die. I’m choosing to harm it to avoid a small inconvenience.

Maybe I would prefer it not to die, but I’m actively making a choice to do something that kills it, so really there’s not such a difference.

▲

avazhi 21 hours ago | parent [-]

I mean, if we're talking about intention then yes there's a huge difference, that's the entire point.

But more to the point, your example is (as I'm sure you know) laughably simplistic. Cigarettes and PFAS play a probability game: the stats guys come to you and say, 'Hey boss, so if we sell 100,000 units of this product, there's a 20% chance than 5 people will be genetically susceptible to this particular novel molecule we're using, and 1 of them has a 10% chance of going on to develop bone cancer within 25 years. Should we sell it anyway?'

If you put it that way it isn't so obvious what the answer is. Most products have the potential to cause harm to some segment of the population. It's absolutely true that cigarettes and PFAS are two examples where the harms are much more rigorously established (especially with cigarettes, going back half a century), but the point stands: it's not a matter of chucking a chocolate bar at your dog. Again, you could plug the actual numbers in for the potential harms of PFAS and I don't think you'd be able to say that Dupont 'intended' to harm anybody, notwithstanding that they were clearly negligent.

	▲	cluckindan 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		PFAS were first determined to be harmful by internal industry scientists in the early 1960s, with documented evidence showing animal toxicity (including liver damage) and warnings of human health risks by the late 1960s and 1970s.