GESTIÓN EN SALUD PÚBLICA: BioEdge: Are executives guilty of murder if their products kill?

jueves, 4 de julio de 2019

BioEdge: Are executives guilty of murder if their products kill?

BioEdge: Are executives guilty of murder if their products kill?

Bioedge

Are executives guilty of murder if their products kill?

by Michael Cook | 29 Jun 2019 | 2 comments

What is the difference between corporate executives selling dangerous projects like weapons, sugar, tobacco, asbestos, and fossil fuels and common murderers? According to Jeff McMahan, an Oxford University moral philosopher, not much. In a recent issue of the New Statesman (UK), he calls for criminal penalties.

The difference lies in the fact that a murderer is responsible for the death of one or more people – a handful at most. A manager does not intend the deaths of his victims, but he raises the probability of harm to a vast number.

the scale of their action ensures that it will cause a vast amount of suffering and many deaths – far more than ordinary murderers cause. While other people, including the victims themselves, share responsibility for these deaths, that does not diminish the responsibility of the executives. What is more, the executives’ action is not merely premeditated but is dictated by years of meticulous planning, usually with careful attention to the law, which provides ample opportunity for moral reflection.

While civil penalties do have some deterrent value, corporations often treat them as operating costs. They know that it will be less costly to fight a legal battle than to reengineer a product to ensure safety.

Threatening executives with criminal punishment would provide much more effective deterrence and defence. It could save thousands or possibly even millions of lives. This would of course require modifications of the criminal law that are now almost inconceivable, when corporate executives have unprecedented political power. Yet with so much at stake, it is imperative to criminalize the predatory forms of deception and manipulation I have described.

Michael Cook is editor of BioEdge

It seems that President Trump and President Xi Jinping are best buddies again after mending fences at the G-20 summit in Osaka. They both want to defuse the tit-for-tat trade war which threatens the economic stability of the world economy. "We're right back on track and we'll see what happens," says Mr Trump, although that is not exactly the language of iron-clad guarantees.

The link to bioethics?

Well, it is a bit tenuous, but I’m disappointed that Trump did not bring up China’s egregious human rights abuses. If “egregious” seems offensive, how about flagitious or abhorrent? We’re talking about putting a million Uyghurs in concentration camps because they are Muslims. Some members of the United Nations have fewer than a million people.

And it appears that some of them, along with the persecuted Falun Gong sect, are being quarried for their organs. An article appeared in Nature this week reporting the results of a private investigation. It concluded that “forced organ harvesting is of unmatched wickedness even compared – on a death for death basis - with the killings by mass crimes committed in the last century.”

Is the evidence incontrovertible? No, probably not. But that’s why Trump should have asked some pointed questions.