Purpose: Say some of my thoughts about the legal system, controversy, and effective activism.
I think what’s controversial about uncontroversial laws is their enforcement. This isn’t just for fraud - it applies to ~all laws though in varying degrees.
The most steelman example I can think of is murder. There is nominally a super broad consensus of no murder, if you murder we’ll try really hard to catch you and prosecute you and put you in jail for a long time so you can’t murder any more people cuz we really disapprove of murder.
Except if the victim is unknown, especially if they’re from a low social class and the cops are busy we won’t try so hard to investigate so lots of murders will very predictably remain unsolved. Serial murderers can go for years and many victims without being caught if they target victims people care about less.
Or if the murderer is smart and patient they can figure out ways to do murder that are hard to detect and prosecute, and get away with murders for years. That includes things like setting up systems that get other people to do the physical murdering on your orders and take all the punishment if they’re caught. Lots of murderers are caught only because they did something dumb but if you are the type of murderer who can avoid doing something dumb your chances of not getting caught go way up.
And even when a murderer is caught, the system is overloaded enough that we often let the murderer plead down to something less than full murder, like manslaughter / negligent homicide that lets them get out of jail relatively soon.
Or if the murderer is rich and can hire good lawyers and jury consultants they may get off on a technicality or through skilled jury selection and presentation.
And if they do go to jail the jails are run in such a way that murderers can and often do still murder other inmates or guards. Or if they’re connected to crime organizations they can and often do still issue orders that result in murders outside the jail.
I think all other laws have much bigger enforcement problems than murder. Including fraud.
These enforcement problems exist for reasons lots of people think are good like: due process, preventing abuse of power, personal privacy, keeping taxes low, letting accused people put on the best defense they can, and humane treatment of prisoners. The balance between the things people like which cause enforcement problems and effectively enforcing laws people also like is controversial both in general and in most specific cases.
CAVEAT: I don’t think animals can suffer or that fraud is OK. I’m not trying to argue for either of those positions.
Often it takes lots of people caring enough to push the system to actually effectively enforce particular laws. Especially if the targets for enforcement are rich and well connected. The practical problem here isn’t figuring out that some companies broke the law (in this case, committed fraud), but getting enough people to care enough to push the system hard enough to overcome the enforcement problems and get effective enforcement done.
People have lots of things to care about. Getting their attention and care is hard. It’s also controversial. Other people will oppose you and say people should care about their thing rather than your thing. Even given very widespread anti-fraud consensus I don’t think simply convincing people that some fraud has been committed is anywhere near enough.
So to sum up so far: I don’t see a way to avoid the controversies about legal system tradeoffs required for effective enforcement of fraud laws, and I don’t see a way to avoid the controversy about what laws & cases people ought to spend their limited time and attention caring about enough to ensure adequate enforcement.
The two main levers I can think of to get people to care enough about the case of factory farm fraud are either that they were personally harmed a lot by the fraud, or that animals are suffering a lot by the fraud.
There are two problems I can think of with using personal harm as a lever. The first is it’s hard to prove harm in the amounts people will care about. I’m convinced enough that it’s possible to keep looking into it, but still not convinced it’s significant, and I think I know more about it than most people. I think the hurdle is pretty big.
The second is people who you do manage to prove it to will often just defect: become non-users of the fraudulent product. That’s a good and recommended strategy for minimizing personal harm but one that removes a lot of incentive to care much about the legal cases going forward which in turn makes building a broad public consensus to care a lot pretty difficult.
A good example is cigarettes. People knew they were bad & the tobacco companies were fraudsters for years (I think, but don’t know, maybe decades?) with nothing much being done about it. The people who cared enough about harm to themselves just stopped smoking or never started and then cared about other things rather than cigarettes. The people who didn’t care that much about harm to themselves kept smoking and called them cancer sticks or coffin nails or whatever. My personal opinion is that we only really developed any sort of consensus around smoking and tobacco companies when second-hand smoke became a widespread consideration. Second-hand smoke is a personal harm it was a lot harder to just personally defect out of, so a lot of non-smokers cared. And still it was pretty controversial! And it’s still not fully over. I don’t know details but I think the cigarette companies and vape companies are still doing some bad things.
I don’t know of a direct equivalent to second-hand smoke for food. If you personally stop eating factory farmed meat it’s hard to see a non-controversial way that someone else eating factory farmed meat cases you harm.
On the other hand, if you believe animals can suffer, then stopping eating factory farmed meat yourself doesn’t fix that. So from an activist’s perspective I think it’d be a better lever for consensus building.
If I was an activist, and thought animals could actually suffer and factory farms commited fraud, then suffering would be a more effective lever to get enough people to care about the fraud and get it stopped. Not because animal suffering is uncontroversial, but because controversy seems unavoidable and someone who is convinced of animal suffering will find it much harder to defect from the cause than someone who is convinced of personal harm.