I was thinking “the TV station owner offers the station’s funds”. If the audience knew about it, probably some portion would approve and some portion would be horrified, perhaps some of the latter performatively so. (I think there’s a general hypocrisy in which many people routinely use goods and services that, if you ask them, they intellectually know are probably made in working conditions they consider horrific, and if you tell them about a particular instance, they say they’re outraged, but if you don’t, then they’re not motivated to look into it or think about it and just happily use the thing.) I don’t think the audience particularly has a right to be told about it, any more than Apple has an obligation to tell customers about employee conditions at Foxconn. I suppose this event could become a media scandal, in which case realpolitik suggests the option of offering Jones more money to sign an NDA.
I was considering the morals of the situation and not the implementation with today’s legal system. You may be right. Though I could imagine various remedies: (a) Jones’s contract may have clauses covering this already; (b) the station people might come up with other reasons they didn’t extricate Jones (“Of course we wanted to get him out, but we were trying to root-cause the problem / looking for other things that were broken / worried that messing with it might cause a power surge, and that took an hour”), reasons which it might be impossible to prove in court that they didn’t believe.
An important part of the scenario that seems unrealistic is that people could know in advance that Jones will be electrically shocked for an hour in a way that will cause extreme pain, but not cause heart attacks or permanent nerve damage. (I guess they could be monitoring him for the former.)
I was thinking “the TV station owner offers the station’s funds”. If the audience knew about it, probably some portion would approve and some portion would be horrified, perhaps some of the latter performatively so. (I think there’s a general hypocrisy in which many people routinely use goods and services that, if you ask them, they intellectually know are probably made in working conditions they consider horrific, and if you tell them about a particular instance, they say they’re outraged, but if you don’t, then they’re not motivated to look into it or think about it and just happily use the thing.) I don’t think the audience particularly has a right to be told about it, any more than Apple has an obligation to tell customers about employee conditions at Foxconn. I suppose this event could become a media scandal, in which case realpolitik suggests the option of offering Jones more money to sign an NDA.
I was considering the morals of the situation and not the implementation with today’s legal system. You may be right. Though I could imagine various remedies: (a) Jones’s contract may have clauses covering this already; (b) the station people might come up with other reasons they didn’t extricate Jones (“Of course we wanted to get him out, but we were trying to root-cause the problem / looking for other things that were broken / worried that messing with it might cause a power surge, and that took an hour”), reasons which it might be impossible to prove in court that they didn’t believe.
An important part of the scenario that seems unrealistic is that people could know in advance that Jones will be electrically shocked for an hour in a way that will cause extreme pain, but not cause heart attacks or permanent nerve damage. (I guess they could be monitoring him for the former.)