Hacker News Reader

Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

I feel like mandating a punishment (i'm making some assumptions on that idea here) would be it's own problem.

Let's say a given private or public organization makes a bad choice. What is the punishment? The guy who flipped the switch?

Dealing the whole topic of misguided or poorly sized punishments with every law seems like it would be a huge hassle. Not unlike mandatory minimums or even just fine ranges that apply reasonably to one scenario, but not at all to others.

View on HN

> Let's say a given private or public organization makes a bad choice. What is the punishment? The guy who flipped the switch?

In the military, orders which tell somebody to break the law aren't legal orders, and soldiers can be punished for following them (importantly, this does not preclude also punishing whoever gave the illegal orders!) Soldiers have a legal obligation to refuse illegal orders. So should bureaucrats.

This is just a polite fiction and no one is ever punished for giving illegal orders or for following them. Bloody Sunday resulted in absolutely no consequences for 1 Para. Tiger Force had illegal orders as their priority, were investigated and found guilty, and then absolutely nothing happened. The My Lai massacre resulted in a slap on the wrist for one guy.

You're wrong. There are some high profile cases where the system breaks down, but there are thousands times more situations that you've never heard about because everything gets done by the book and it never becomes a public outrage.

As of right now the punishment is a warning that if the behavior is repeated the warning will also be. There has to be a middle ground here, difficulty of enforcement can't be the reason to eliminate enforcement entirely.

most of the bill of right amendments are for the government. But let's take the 14th amendment that bars slavery, congress should be mandated to pass laws that punish slave owners. For your specific example, when a company violates the law (e.g.: someone dies) the executives in charge or rogue employees who acted on their own are punished, that is how the law works already.

I was commenting specifically about the bill of rights in the constitution,not laws in general.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com