I think one of the reasons why punitive damages sometimes make sense is in recognition of the fact that the total ‘damage’ (in the colloquial, not legal sense) can sometimes include not just an economic component, but a societal component beyond that.
Here’s an example: suppose a company is concerned about wrongful death suits. There are basically two levers available here: (1) spend $X on making the work environment safer, (2) put $Y aside to cover the cost of such suits, and of course it’s not either/or here. But although this didn’t turn out to be the case in the ‘factories’ example so things turned out well for society, in a given situation, depending on the numbers the best economic option may be a lot of (2) and not so much (1). In this scenario, people will continue to die even if X—Y is very small (in the world where Y does not include punitive damages) and lives could be saved at a very low additional cost to the company. Punitive damages are a tool to make this less likely by imposing a large cost in (for example) a wrongful death scenario even if X—Y (without punitive damages) is small.
If you argue for no punitive damages in civil cases, the same argument could be made for criminal cases, i.e. no jail time and all damages awarded are purely economic. In this case, then, you could murder someone if you had the resources to pay the ‘fare’ of the economic damage this would cause. Which at a societal level isn’t much different to companies being able to choose to let fatal accidents continue to occur, if the workers comp payouts are more affordable than implementing improved safety protocols, and there’s no mechanism available to ‘artificially’ inflate the costs to the company in a wrongful death scenario, like punitive damages.
I think one of the reasons why punitive damages sometimes make sense is in recognition of the fact that the total ‘damage’ (in the colloquial, not legal sense) can sometimes include not just an economic component, but a societal component beyond that.
Here’s an example: suppose a company is concerned about wrongful death suits. There are basically two levers available here: (1) spend $X on making the work environment safer, (2) put $Y aside to cover the cost of such suits, and of course it’s not either/or here. But although this didn’t turn out to be the case in the ‘factories’ example so things turned out well for society, in a given situation, depending on the numbers the best economic option may be a lot of (2) and not so much (1). In this scenario, people will continue to die even if X—Y is very small (in the world where Y does not include punitive damages) and lives could be saved at a very low additional cost to the company. Punitive damages are a tool to make this less likely by imposing a large cost in (for example) a wrongful death scenario even if X—Y (without punitive damages) is small.
If you argue for no punitive damages in civil cases, the same argument could be made for criminal cases, i.e. no jail time and all damages awarded are purely economic. In this case, then, you could murder someone if you had the resources to pay the ‘fare’ of the economic damage this would cause. Which at a societal level isn’t much different to companies being able to choose to let fatal accidents continue to occur, if the workers comp payouts are more affordable than implementing improved safety protocols, and there’s no mechanism available to ‘artificially’ inflate the costs to the company in a wrongful death scenario, like punitive damages.