It's not that they're liable. It's that the employees are uncomfortable doing business with people who they see will use their products to do harm.

It's praiseworthy but not obligatory. And it's also the only real power that Ford employees have.

If you go into a gun shop and the person working the counter believes you're going to use it to kill someone they're well within their right to simply not do business with you. The power to not associate or sell one's goods or labor is pretty much the only tangible power your average citizen has. Might as well let them wield it sometimes.

> It's that the employees are uncomfortable doing business with people who they see will use their products to do harm.

This is a ridiculous attitude. The vast, vast majority of police actions keep the populace in general from greater harm. This is just virtue signalling at scale, and I am glad the CEO is ignoring this.

> If you go into a gun shop and the person working the counter believes you're going to use it to kill someone they're well within their right to simply not do business with you.

This is an asinine comparison, and I think you know that.

The citizen only has the power to resign. The subtext here is a "threat to resignation".

The citizen also has the right to speak, to vote, and much, much more.

And I imagine they’re already doing that

I disagree. They create cars designed to help police do their jobs, police aren't just buying the same cars available to the general public. So if the cars they create for the police are used to oppress people, I think they do have some liability.

To be clear I don't think that they should stop selling cars to the police, pretty much everyone agrees the police are necessary, so I think it is also necessary to have companies sell cars to them. But if you work with an oppressive organization to create tools to help them do their jobs, you are partially responsible for what they do with those tools.

“So if the cars they create for the police are used to oppress people”

It’s not the cars that are the problem — there’s no modification that somehow senses POC and then runs over them, for example. Do you also stop selling them clothes because the uniforms are designed for cops as well?

This isn’t something where you can say this is universally bad. They’re a fundamental part of society - there to enforce laws. And if you agree that police are necessary, then they need to get around somehow.

I can appreciate how these employees feel like this is a way they can create change. They work for Ford, after all. But it’s a classic “when you have a hammer” situation. The problem is way more complex and nuanced. This only works against you because it makes your arguments look silly to those you want to convince to care.

I agree that police are fundamental in the US so it is ok to make cars for them, I made the exact same argument you did. What I disagree with is the argument that you are not responsible for how the tools you produce are used.

If you are creating a legitimate product and making it available to everyone, I don't think you should be generally held responsible for how it is used (ex. guns, civilian vehicles). But that is not what Ford is doing - they are working with law enforcement to create vehicles suited to their needs, they are specifically working to make it easier for police to do their jobs. I think that gives them some responsibility, in the same way that I would feel like a company making military vehicles for Saudi Arabia has some responsibility for how they are used.

Yes and no.

First, I'm sure we all agree that police brutality and murder are wrong. Second, the police are not the criminal justice system. They are law enforcement.

Ultimately, those cars enable quite a lot of good as well. Lives saved. Property saved. And so on. That doesn't make the wrongs forgivable. But where are Fords exported? Saudi Arabia? China? How much work does Ford do that's DOD related? If we zoom out a bit, police cars feel like chump change.

Makes sense. Even if the creator of the car never had the intention of making cars so that police men can use the cars to oppress people; the creators of those cars become liable as soon as they have knowledge of what those cars are used for.

Thus as a car creator you must take some level of responsibility for any atrocity your car is associated with.

For example did you know 1.36 million car related fatalities happen per year every year? If you make cars you are participating in the violent mass slaughter of people on a scale that dwarfs the genocide committed during the holocaust. In the US alone car manufacturers are responsible for creating cars that kill 100 people per day.

Does creating a tool that you know with absolute certainty will "accidentally" kill millions of people make it an "accident?" Are you guilty for murder when you create something that you know with absolute certainty that it will kill people?

To make the moral contradiction even more confusing let's examine people who make weapons.

As a maker of nuclear weapons you know that there will be exactly zero deaths in the next year due to nuclear explosions. Thus you've killed less people than the car maker and you're fully aware that your weapon is basically going to kill nobody. You want to pick a career that will absolutely kill zero people? Make nuclear weapons.

Even a ladder maker is aware sometimes people die when they fall off ladders but I can guarantee you that nobody died in a nuclear explosion last year.

Even if you make hand guns for the police, those guns will kill less black people than the amount of cars that killed black people. So car makers have killed more Black people than police men and gun manufacturers. Does that make them more racist? No.

You may be thinking that the above logic is absurd and your mind must be racing furiously to come up with counter-logic to make sense of all the garbage I said above. I'm telling you right now that it's a pointless endeavor to make sense of it all. It's pointless to talk about it and it's pointless to think about it. Morality was never suppose to make any sense.

Your morality is an inborn emotional module in your brain that is designed to help you survive and navigate a prehistorical setting where you lived as cavemen in a tribe. It's designed only for survival it was not designed for logical internal and external consistency. Think about it. Does Natural selection and evolution evolve these moral instincts in your head to help you create world peace or to help you survive so you can reproduce? Whether or not your morals had internal and external logical consistency never really was a factor for helping you survive thus your brain evolved moral instincts that can be highly contradictory when examined closely.

It's not suppose to be consistent and it's not suppose to make any sense.

Once you realize this, then you'll know all this stuff is really kind of pointless.

Don't think about it too deeply, is my advice... just deal with the surface issue: racism... there is no need to attack the manufacturer who makes police badges... because in the end even the surface issue of racism is sort of a superficial exaggeration from a cosmological perspective.

Even when you just consider the fact that the USA is already one of the least racist countries in the entire world it's sort of inconsequential. Have any of you been to other countries? The racism is on another scale in most other places.

The key point you are missing is that Ford created cars specifically tailored towards law enforcement. If the police were just buying Ford Fusions from the dealer like everyone else, I wouldn't consider them at all responsible. But they are specifically designing vehicles to help law enforcement, which I think gives them some responsibility.

In my example above i specifically cited someone who makes guns or nuclear weapons.

Those people make bombs and guns knowing full well that these weapons will kill less people than cars even though the base intention of the weapon is to kill.

> Ford is no more liable for actions of bad cops than Volkswagen, BMW, or Mercedes were for the actions of the nazis.

Interesting piece of history: "Ironically" Ford is actually sort of liable for the actions of the Nazi's, well Henry Ford that is. Henry Ford was a BIG anti semite. Hitler himself has said Ford's anti semitism was an inspiration to him, Ford is also mentioned favourably a couple of times in Hitlers Mein Kampf, was awarded a high Nazi medal for his virtue in anti semtism and apparently Hitler for a time had a photo on his desk of Ford...

Perhaps a bad analogy given that Volkswagen, BMW, and Daimler-Benz all made use of slave labor provided by the Nazis.

For completeness: So did the German factory of Ford even though they weren't required by the Nazi's to do so.

Didn't Ford build like, a lot of tanks and airplane stuff for WWII for the USA?

Even if the old man was a facist, think we can all be grateful for all the machines they built to help the Allies win the war.

http://michiganhistory.leadr.msu.edu/wwii-and-ford-motor-com...

Dunno, maybe the evidence is more mixed

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/daily/nov98/n...

By the end of the war, Ford had built 86,865 complete aircraft, 57,851 airplane engines, 4,291 military gliders, and thousands of engine superchargers and generators. In addition to aircraft, Ford plants built 277,896 of the versatile vehicles (tanks, armored cars, and jeeps).

It sounds like Ford's assets were essentially nationalized by the Germans during that period, which makes sense. Seems very foolish to let an American company directly control factories in Nazi Germany.

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/ford-motor-company-nbsp...

> Volkswagen

Which is literally Hitler's creation (the name means People's car)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen#1932%E2%80%931938:_...