[gunshai]

> Should you be able to knowingly create a product which harms consumers and provide it to them while failing to disclose that fact?

With only this question as a guide the answer should be a resounding yes. Mainly because there are trade offs for everything. The downside to every trade off can be harm.

There are an immeasurable amount of ways harm can manifest, also answering no to this questions clearly incentivizes less, not more product transparency. I so desperately want to restate the question in a manner that accounts for the inevitability of discovered future liability, however it's not coming to me at the moment.

[safety1st]

Well, you're definitely going against the grain on this if you say yes. This is how they got the tobacco companies to pay damages for the health consequences of their products, and get them to add warning labels to their products. I think at the least it's a matter of truth in advertising if you're aware of common negative side effects your product has and you don't disclose them. It's dishonest.

[gunshai]

> This is how they got the tobacco companies to pay damages

I'm not against this, but consider that those damages are future unknown liabilities from when the product was first sold.

Do we really think that southern tobacco farmers or how ever far back the tobacco industry really goes, there was a forethought about the potential harm? I'd wager no, they saw a market for a product that people liked at the time I'd wager the entire idea of addiction was hardly understood when the industry started. From my historical knowledge addiction as a form of profit was first discovered by the East India Trading company as it was the first entity to trade opium to the Chinese, which by the way literally kept the English Monarchy from going bankrupt(more of a factoid then a piece relevant to my response).

My overall point is, we discover some harms because of scale or after long periods of time both of which are future liabilities. The discussion is WHEN we discover these harms at scale how do we handle them. Emergent harm is a society level issue, but for many products it's almost beyond a secondary or tertiary effect.

> I think at the least it's a matter of truth in advertising if you're aware of common negative side effects your product has and you don't disclose them. It's dishonest.

This isn't something I outright disagree with however the solution is one of incentive. It's clear that in the game of future liabilities for products as I think we can agree societal level harm is typically the more costly one both from a bottom line standpoint and from a human health or human harm standpoint.

The incentive here is pretty obvious sounding the alarm of harm is not in the interest of anyone profiting on it.