AAAAAAAH! Darn rodents! Never meant to hit Submit before Preview!
Oh. Wait. No, that’s not true. I love the hamsters. Really they are great. Sorry about including the rest of Grim_Beaker’s post at the end of mine. I forgot to remove it before submitting my post. :smack:
Isn’t product liability is affected by who knows what? For instance, if I’m a car manufacturer and I know my cars spontaneously combust (5% a year) but tell people they’re completely safe, I’m almost certainly guilty, of fraud if nothing else. I’ve deliberately sold a product under false pretences. Similarly, if I tell people the car can run safely at 100 mph when it can only run safely at 80 mph, I’m liable even though running a car at 100 mph isn’t really a ‘normal’ use, because I lied about my product.
On the other hand, if the buyer knows what’s going on, where’s the government’s place in anything? We’ve mentioned that making anything safer makes it more expensive; maybe I as the consumer am willing to accept the risk in exchange for the reduced price (my family could get a car much safer than the one we have now, but it would be less spacious and more expensive, and it would have much worse gas milage. For that matter, we could armor-plate the car, but if we required all cars to be plated like tanks no one would be aple to afford them). If I buy a car in full knowledge that it tends to combust when hit from the rear, it’s my own fault.
The gray area exists when the manufacturer/seller didn’t know the risk. For instance, if I sell a car with a tendency to combust, but don’t know it, am I liable? If there was some reason I should have known (I refused to run tests because I didn’t want to know) or made claims that it wouldn’t (I ran flawed tests that indicated it wouldn’t, and promised it wouldn’t), then I probably am liable. But if I did my best to determine safety and couldn’t find a flaw, I, at least, don’t think I should be liable for what I’ve already sold. On the other hand, I have to tell people before I sell any more.
Of course, this doesn’t mean I won’t recall the product anyway–this is often just good business. I want customers to trust me, after all.
As a final note on safety: we can never be absolutely safe. Each of us will suffer some risk, depending on what we do; the tradeoff between risk and convenience is something each person has to decide for himself. We should help him be informed, but if he makes a knowledgable decision to accept a greater risk, there’s no reason we should force him to do otherwise.