In practice decisions of CEOs of large corporations routinely lead to harming a great lot of people and they get very minor reprecussions for it if any.
True. But there is also a kind of scaling error here.
Suppose you run a small business with one employee. You ask your employee to do something slightly risky. Most of the time it works out fine. And if it doesn’t, it’s a tragic freak accident.
Now scale up. Your business now employs millions of people. Someone is dying from the job every few days.
Any tradeoff on sufficiently large scales is going to have many lives on both sides of the equations. Which makes it very easy to paint the CEO’s as evil mass murderers if you ignore the other side of the tradeoff.
True. But there is also a kind of scaling error here.
Suppose you run a small business with one employee. You ask your employee to do something slightly risky. Most of the time it works out fine. And if it doesn’t, it’s a tragic freak accident.
Now scale up. Your business now employs millions of people. Someone is dying from the job every few days.
Any tradeoff on sufficiently large scales is going to have many lives on both sides of the equations. Which makes it very easy to paint the CEO’s as evil mass murderers if you ignore the other side of the tradeoff.