There is a deep difference of power and control between the average consumer and a multinational food processing corporation. The argument of the burden being on individual responsibility you are trying to make can only be made if the consumer is not being aggressively misinformed about the limited choices of products available to them for the prices they can afford. The company in question has the resources to make their relationship with the target consumer a very asymmetrical one, and they are always positioned with more information and more leverage.

Surely if you're taking the dry, deterministic outlook on this discussion you'd take this into consideration.

Honest question: do you see nothing wrong with someone monetising other people's lack of self control?

Devil's advocate: why shoud they not do it? Unless every other food producer does the same, sugary foods will still be available but Nestle would lose out on the profits.

We don't accept that sort of rationale for anything else. I'll go shoplift some stuff (maybe steal some Nestlé products); other people are still going to steal whether I do or not, so I might as well not lose out on the profits.

Perhaps we should create and enforce regulations to prevent all companies from preying on the very human lack of self control.

That's a good point, from a purely economics point of view it doesn't make sense to stop. Having said that, Nestle pulling out of selling sugary products entirely would dent the market hugely, but someone else would eventually fill the gap. The moral aspect is a whole other question...

If every food producer were to follow that dictum, no one would have to take responsibility. So everyone would be incentivized to break the rules.

And if anyone wanted to begin new a behavior harmful to others, they would only have to ensure others also do it.

Decisions have to made on values, not whether someone else is already doing it. If someone's getting away with a crime, it doesn't mean you get to do it, too. It still means neither of you should be doing it.

This almost implies that some people are born with a lack of self control? You can't just simplify it like that.

From birth, everything we process with our senses adds to our understanding of the world and our ability to navigate it. If Nestle has enough money to flood the market with information supporting themselves, how can you expect people to make the right choices? And remember, not everyone has the fortune of growing up in a balanced environment that allows them to evolve a rational way of thinking, so they aren't just gonna jump on HN and start doing some research.

You can't just take the first order approximation. You gotta do the full expansion, man.

Diabetes is a product of genetics. If you have the bad genes, and you overeat sugar, you will get diabetes. If you don't have the genes, overeating the sugar will still have bad longterm effects (fatty liver, etc) but you will most likely not get diabetes.