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by twblalock
1253 days ago
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Think about who actually suffers if you punish a company in this way: the customers, and the employees, most of whom did nothing wrong. That is not justice. Punishing people for something they did not do is wrong, period. And collective punishment is widely regarded as a violation of basic human rights -- it's even banned by the Geneva conventions! Furthermore, the possibility of such a punishment would have a chilling effect on business to an extent that would seriously damage the economy. For all these reasons, no responsible government would enforce that kind of punishment on a company, and even if they tried, it would be struck down in court. Punishments for a lot of corporate rule breaking are viewed as a "slap on the wrist" because sometimes the rules that were broken just aren't that important. Similarly, we don't usually put people in prison for speeding. |
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The problem is with the scale of punishing an entire company, though. There's a lot of fallout from that, it's true. So the punishment would need to be fair, limiting the offending entity as a whole without unduly harming innocent employees. This could be where the analogy breaks down (which argues towards how unfair the personhood of corporations is, if there's no good recourse for wrongdoing).
As for a chilling effect ... yeah, that's the idea. Employees in a company would be very much more interested in staying on the right side of the law because of the heightened risk to, well, everybody.
I'm reminded of businesses that need to stay accredited, or licensed, or otherwise in legal compliance with something in order to function at all. If one errs enough (criminally, say), it loses that blessing, and could end up folding, and all the innocent employees are out of a job.