This is a bogus modernist interpretation that dilutes the meaning of violence. Fortunately, it’s being rejected after having a moment that peaked during lockdown.
How should this be treated? Fining the company for someone’s actions that caused deaths doesn’t seem enough.
Again, why does personal responsibility for harm to others bother you?
Personal responsibility is irrelevant. You’re constructing a lower threshold for criminality. I know the first thing I’d be trying to figure out is how to put my competitors in jail.
Let’s take Epic v Apple. Epic went to court. It lost. This entire saga has cost Epic’s shareholders billions. Should Sweeney go to jail? Would the world be better if an Apple-friendly prosecutor could take up that challenge?
If we have a cultural failing in America, it’s having a reflexive urge to turn outrage into jail time.
Provide an incentive for companies to regulate each other! Let rational self-interest clean up the market while the state steps back and looks on!
Do you think there is a reason every modern democracy resists privatising criminal prosecution? (They had it in Rome. We probably need a history of law section in the basic high-school curriculum.)
We already have private enforcement of many rules. Environmental ones, for example. We’re specifically discussing criminality, putting people in jail.
If you believe figurative and actual violence are identical, this analogy makes sense.