>corporations ARE liable for the damages.

The corporations are, the owners of the corporations are not. And to a large degree they can't ever be (even if we always pierce the corporate veil, you can't lose money you don't have, so there's always a limit to how much you can lose). This actually is a fundamental flaw with pure capitalism. If there's a tiny chance of catastrophic failure,

> Every car has a chance of killing you. You could make cars a lot safer, but it would cost a lot more money. So it makes no sense to do so.

I am not speaking of the risk inherent to the use of certain products. I'm speaking of the knowing and purposeful decision to value profit over human causality (just as a most recent example, General Motors).

Every process has a chance of failure (a design or manufacturing defect). Eliminating it is completely impossible, so how do you decide what the "appropriate" amount of dead people is?

The fact of the matter is that you have to quantify moral imperatives in order to have a functioning society, and lawsuits are the way we do that. There might be a better way, but it has nothing to do with corporations or even capitalism.

Every system has to figure out a way to quantify moral imperatives. Speaking in the most plain terms, if it costs $10 billion to save a single random life, it is not worth it. Someone has to make a decision on how much a life is worth. In our current system, judges do that in lawsuits, and I don't see any particular problem with that. So if a corporation does a calculation and determines that the profits it will make are higher than the lawsuit payout, that's exactly what they're supposed to do.

It might look like it's the corporation making the decision to disregard human life, but it's actually a judge putting a price on human life.

The biggest problem with lawsuits are that they're not guaranteed to succeed. The corporation might be responsible for the death of some people, and they might not have to make any payout.