harm causing defect will it is claimed take greater care regarding safety both in design and in manufacture than a company that knows it will be held liable only for negligence but this argument faces obvious objections for one thing no amount of pressure from an sl system can prevent defects that cannot reasonably be foreseen or controlled which presumably applies to most cases where companies are not negligent further more if we are focusing on consequences we have to consider the bad consequences of sl as well as the good driving some useful companies out of business either directly through high sl judgments against them or indirectly through skyrocketing insurance costs preventing the production of useful goods and services simply because of fears relating to sl and so on but the main problem with sua is that it is indeed merely a conseqentialist argument it does not even address the question of justice and thus does nothing to undermine cra
turning to dba its claim is that sl is justified by the fact that it provides an equitable distribution of the financial burden faced by the injured consumer if ann is seriously injured by toolsinc defective power saw then if toolsinc is held liable the financial burden is not borne by ann but by toolsinc which in turn can distribute it equitably it can cover the cost by for example raising the price of the relevant item slightly so that the cost is borne by a large number of customers on one of whom has to pay very much but however the crucial notion of equity is construed here this aegument fails as a response to cra if equity is construed along the lines suggested by cra itself or indeed by any plausible view that attempts to link equitable distribution of the burden to responsibility then of course it is not equitable to make toolsinc other customers pay even if on single customer has to pay very much for those customers are of course not responsible for ann injury but if equity is not conceived this way then the only content left seems to be the bare idea of spreading the burden to lots of people so that no one person has to pay very much but apart from the fact that this is a highly dubious conception of equity if for example a professor suddenly announced in one of his large lecture classes that all the students in the room that day would be required to pay for his dinner that evening I seriously doubt that any of the students would regard that as equitable merely because no one student was being required to pay very much it does not yield the desired results for if the sole aim at issue is indeed spreading the burden to lots