From a legal point of view, yes Amazon is a person, and that’s the ground on which it can be sued, unlike "Nature" that generated the tornado — though lately things started to move a bit on that side all around the world.[2,3,4,6,7,8,9]
But even that is missing the forest for the tree I think. It seems to me that the point raised by moring is more like can these words be honestly stated as accurate as when The Mail & Guardian titles "The Nigerian government is killing its citizens — again[1]". Although it can be argued that this geopolitical entity is a pure human fiction, there are actual humans that are willingly planning to kill other people.
As awful as the resulting situation might be, I doubt that within Amazon case they were plans and orders to deliberately kill annoying employees. It doesn’t mean Amazon behavior is acceptable, nor is the fact that some government have let Amazon build this situation.
[1] https://mg.co.za/africa/2020-10-21-the-nigerian-government-i...
[2] https://theselfless.org/mother-nature-a-legal-person/
[3] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/transnational-enviro...
[4] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/05/nature-legal-personho...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights_of_nature_in_Ecuador
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rights_of_nature#Related_initi...
[7] https://insideclimatenews.org/news/31102022/celebrating-vict...
[8] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-46523-0_...
[9] https://asiapacific.unwomen.org/en/digital-library/publicati...
Yes, that was what I meant. It was admittedly fueled by the confusion when I started from "did I miss some major news", as well as a lack of knowledge of what "literally" means, as indicated by the other responses.
Had a rough couple of weeks and it seems it's getting the best of me.
I don't see anyone here say Amazon murdered (deliberately killed) people, but arguing they killed people. Kill can mean murder, which implies intent/doing so deliberately, but can also mean manslaughter, which does not require it to be deliberate.
To my mind, "kill" wasn’t something you might inadvertedly do, except maybe for bugs and thus small entities.
Anyway, once again, in no way I mean to play Amazon attorney here.
Are you implying that this word game ("Ha! Amazon didn't literally kill him by a physical attack!") somehow changes anything in terms of blame? Or are you just arguing semantics for the fuck of it?
> this is just a case of mis-using the word "literally" for dramatic effect
No, this is you not understanding that words have different meanings in different contexts. Amazon has literally killed them, as in, performed a manslaughter. The fact that it is not a person only changes the mechanism - instead of stabbing them, they performed gross negligence. Why you consider that a "literal manslaughter" must have an element of physical assault is beyond me, but in the end, it's just your own definition of the word.