[wutbrodo]

> much like paying a dividend to victims of a polluting chemical factory to offset their deleterious health effects

Out of curiosity, why would this be morally wrong? To avoid reasoning-by-connotation, replace the word dividend with a word that connotes something positive (eg reparations): would you say that the functionally-identical ongoing payment of reparations to victims of pollution would be wrong?

[jdmichal]

Not OP, but this is how I see it. It's a bit like the daycare late fines experiment:

https://rady.ucsd.edu/faculty/directory/gneezy/pub/docs/fine...

Here's a digestible Freakonomics bit which discusses the same:

http://freakonomics.com/2013/10/23/what-makes-people-do-what...

When there was not a price on being late, the price paid was actually moral. That is, being late was a bad thing to do and so you should feel bad. However, when a monetary price was introduced, it was no longer morally bad to be late, as long as you paid the fee. The monetary-price replaced the moral-price, and it ended up that there were a lot of people willing to pay money where they weren't willing to pay morally. And so the truancy rate rose with introduction of late fees.

I would guess that that is what OP meant. If you introduce a price, you can actually remove even stronger restrictions that are in place based on morality. Because as long as you're being charged, you can assume the price is inclusive of your moral hazard.

[gnode]

> I would guess that that is what OP meant. If you introduce a price, you can actually remove even stronger restrictions that are in place based on morality. Because as long as you're being charged, you can assume the price is inclusive of your moral hazard.

This, but also that a dividend gives a mandate to continue.

I'd say that dividends and fines are distinct, in that a fine typically comes with the understanding that wilfully continuing what you got fined for will result in an even larger fine. Conversely, accepting money in return for some wrong committed against you would typically make it harder to get an injunction against that activity.

[wutbrodo]

I'm not sure it makes sense to model companies as moral agents in the same way you would individuals, especially when you're talking about unintuitive moral reasoning that leans heavily on individual feeling, like the Haifa daycare study. Hell, I thought it was a pretty common belief around here (and more broadly) to model corporations as amoral utility-maximizers, in which case a fine is the central way of aligning incentives (for non-criminal actions).

[gnode]

Even when modelling corporations as amoral entities, they still exist within a morally aware system. They are to some extent beholden to their customers, employees, and courts of law, which all make decisions of morality about their actions.

A dividend (or similar payment) generally improves the legitimacy of an action, whereas being fined for it does not.

[smileysteve]

I would say that the reparations are not morally reprehensible, as they are paying for damage already done. Unless of course, a company makes a decision that harms people, animals accounting for future reparations.

In the case of the dividend to pollute, you force people to choose between money/power/economy and them/their children having cancers and birth defects.

This is perhaps where the analogy breaks; ignoring DNA and credit, data may lack cross generational effects.

[gnode]

> Unless of course, a company makes a decision that harms people, animals accounting for future reparations.

To clarify, I was suggesting this case; that a company deliberately starts or continues a business which physiologically harms people, whereby these people are compensated as an ongoing cost of doing business, as opposed to a fine for desisted wrongdoing.

That is, I think, a truer analogy to what is being proposed with this data dividend. Granted, it breaks down at congenital disorders.