You could have other forms of accountability sure: freedom, life, and so on. For several reasons, we have settled on money as the preferred form unless the responsible party has a good chance of harming others in future.
Except the monetary accountability comes from the company, and the people responsible remain rich and successful. In order to put the brakes on unethical and immoral behavior, personal accountability must be a possibility. As in, you will go to jail if you intentionally hurt others via decisions made at work.
> For several reasons, we have settled on money as the preferred form unless the responsible party has a good chance of harming others in future.
Sorry, but in which universe? The people who're responsible for harming millions almost always get away with a fine that can be brushed away as the cost of doing business, and they almost always reoffend precisely because they never have to face justice.
Meanwhile the working class people who haven't harmed anyone regularly get arrested and go to jail for nonviolent offences. If I made $50k a year and killed 1,000 people by poisoning their water supply, do you think I could escape arrest by paying a $1000 fine? Would you feel like that's an appropriate level of accountability if I knew that my actions were killing those people?
This is stupid because the marginal value of money is nothing when you have enough. So it's simply a get out of jail ticket we give to part of the society. The worst part IMHO.
Try to design an alternative though, go and actually give it a try. And you are immediately going to find several historical anecdotes where your idea had gone horribly wrong.
You could have other forms of accountability sure: freedom, life, and so on. For several reasons, we have settled on money as the preferred form unless the responsible party has a good chance of harming others in future.