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points by fasterik 2 days ago | 0 comments
There is also a "profit motive makes it wrong" idea permeating at least parts of the culture, which is equally suspect. We should apply standards consistently and judge the ethics by the amount of harm that was caused.
[–] __MatrixMan__ 2 days ago
It's not equally suspect. Profit seeking behavior, left unchecked, yields problematic outcomes rather quickly. Unmonetized actions don't seem to have this tendency. Like, nobody volunteers to distribute contaminated food, but people will do so quite readily in service to their bottom line. Until we can find a way to bias our economic outputs away from things that harm and towards things that help, guilty until proven innocent is the right heuristic for profit seekers.
[–] gbacon 2 days ago
> Like, nobody volunteers to distribute contaminated food, but people will do so quite readily in service to their bottom line.

Who? Name names. You are making a bold, broad claim. Who are these specific people against whom you have specific evidence of their willingness to “distribute contaminated food … quite readily in service to their bottom line”?

[–] __MatrixMan__ 2 days ago
The incident I had in mind is described here: https://www.fda.gov/food/outbreaks-foodborne-illness/investi...

A quote from that page:

> FDA’s leading hypothesis remains that this was likely an act of economically motivated adulteration.

Maybe the cinnamon case was an isolated incident, but the use of lead compounds to change a food's color is a trend. Per https://www.npr.org/2024/10/24/nx-s1-5119336/cinnamon-lead-f...

> We're aware of this practice in turmeric, where lead chromate has been added to enhance the color

Are you actually going to argue that people don't do things that are unsafe for others when money is on the line? We're living in an ocean of evidence that it happens.

[–] gbacon 1 day ago
When asked for specifics about the evidently irresponsible charge that you made, you answered with conjectures.
[–] __MatrixMan__ 1 day ago
I thought that individual anecdotes would be less convincing than evidence that "economically motivated adulteration" is an entire classification for such crimes used by the FDA, which was created to prevent them.

Its not hard to find specific examples. 5 minutes of searching will find piles and piles of them.

If you must have a name, Stewart Parnell was convicted of knowingly distributing salmonella contaminated peanuts in 2015. 9 People died. He got 28 years in prison.

You don't have to trust the news either. Just ask around. I know a teacher who has lost two students to surprise fentanyl. I'm sure there are similarly affected people in your community. Unregulated markets are a slippery slope towards deaths by poison. It happens all over the world (but more in places without an FDA equivalent).

[–] preg_match 2 days ago
It's a thing, it's called food fraud. Happens commonly these days with various spices, which are often cut with metals to increase their weight. Sometimes those metals are heavy metals, which are obviously bad for you.

Historically this happened to basically all food. Meat was sold rotten, meat was pumped with water for volume, people lied about what meat they were selling, meat was glued together with other meat to create reconstituted cuts that were sold as whole, and on and on. We had exposes, The Jungle, and now that basically doesn't exist because of the FDA.

But, in countries without an FDA equivalent, you can imagine that food fraud runs wild. It ran wild in the US, too, and I think it's fair to say that the only thing limiting it isn't morals, it's the FDA and regulatory framework we've built.

[–] gbacon 1 day ago
Name names; name and shame. Be specific about the charge you’re making. I’m not interested in the handwaving.

I assume that you understand that The Jungle was a work of fiction and that Ida Tarbell’s father was a failed oilman.

[–] fasterik 2 days ago
"Guilty until proven innocent" is an authoritarian, quasi-Stalinist view. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with seeking profit, and most people who do so are completely within ethical bounds. For the ones who do unethical things, we have laws and courts to decide that and to punish them appropriately.
[–] __MatrixMan__ 2 days ago
Maybe not intrinsically, but until it stops hurting people in practice, we are going to remain suspicious.