At first I thought you were going to reference the Ford Pinto case… which is a great illustration of why short term shareholder value prioritization leads to unethical behavior which must be countered by public action.
Simply put, Ford was proven to have decided to not fix a defect that was immolating their customers, because the repairs would cut into their profits more than would the wrongful death damages from lawsuits.
The only ways for the civilization to rebalance that calculation to counter such bad results are punishments such as punitive damages, which are specifically designed to be large enough to cause enough pain to the company to overcome the profit motive on the other side.
“Tort Reform” as a rallying cry of the tea baggers and various other republican cohorts is precisely the attempt to remove this counterbalance and revert corporate profit calculation to the same schema used by Ford in the Pinto case, and the tobacco companies prior to the 1980s, which guarantees unethical behavior, and ensures that ethical corporations must lose when competing with unethical ones.
