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uboat53 · 28 days ago

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Well, it's been the news a lot and the reaction has sparked a few things, so who's up for a LONG RANT (TM) with some thoughts that have come to me as I've been watching the CEO killing coverage?

LAW AND MORALITY

As the story has gone on, it's been clear that there's a disconnect between coverage of the victim and how the public views him. In the news coverage, he's only broken the law against intoxicated driving, but in public opinion he's a vicious murderer responsible for mass death. What gives? Well, let's take a look at the difference between law and morality.

Immanuel Kant once said "In law a man is guilty when he violates the rights of others. In ethics he is guilty if he only thinks of doing so." Given that the law is a precise (as precise a possible) list while morality is infinitely complex and nuanced, it is impossible for the two to match exactly, but it is generally agreed that it is best if the law matches morality as precisely as possible with prosecutorial discretion being used to make it match even closer. But what happens when the law diverges from accepted morality?

This isn't a trick question, it's actually one of the things that happens in a society where the government is unrepresentative of its people. In America, this is happening to the greatest extreme around laws that affect corporations, where corporations are able to lobby, cajole, and bribe (there's no other word for large campaign contributions in my opinion) lawmakers into making changes to law that benefit the corporation and harm individuals. According to the law, Brian Thompson and other corporate executives have done nothing wrong, but that doesn't mean much when they're the ones who basically get to write the law in the first place.

When law diverges from broadly accepted morality, the law loses legitimacy. If there is no law against mass murder, then why should anyone obey the law against individual murder that does exist? This does not mean that morality ceases to exist, those who commit these actions may still be following clear and coherent moral codes, it simply means that the law itself is no longer respected as a guide to what is right and wrong.

The solution, of course, is for the law to come more into line with accepted morality. In order for this to happen, however, corporations are going to have to loosen their hold on our government, something they have shown no inclination of doing in the last several decades.

CAPITALISM

If you point a gun at someone and pull the trigger, are you responsible for their death? I think that one's obvious, so how about another one? If you ask someone to go on the train tracks knowing there's no way off the tracks and a train is coming, are you responsible? I think the answer is fairly clear here, so let's take another step. If you design a device intended for widespread use that has a 0.5% chance of catastrophically failing and killing someone over a 10 year span, are you responsible for the deaths that occur?

This one's a little tougher, isn't it? Doesn't it depend on what the device does, how it's marketed, and how it's used? What if the chance were 0.05%? Or 0.005%? Does that change anything?

When a person is more and more removed from the actual death, injury, or other harm caused by their actions, it's harder and harder to assign direct moral responsibility to them, isn't it? When you get to the point of sitting in a corporate board room making decisions about corporate policies, it's almost impossible for a person to feel responsible for any harm because the actual consequences of their decisions are so abstracted from what they are doing.

But let's not mince words, corporate executives, like political leaders, can be responsible for a massive amount of harm without ever directly taking action against another individual. The decision to deny coverage for a specific drug may consign thousands to pain and suffering while procedural decisions regarding the process to approve or deny any coverage at a national corporation can cause exponentially more harm than any individual action. It's worth noting that our legal system, while capable of prosecuting and punishing a single person who causes direct harm to another individual, has absolutely no ability to address the moral harm of an individual who causes mass harm through systemic means.

Now, corporate executives and the owners of the companies will say that they're required to put their fiduciary duty first, but is there any moral system you can name that would put fiduciary duty ahead of basic human morality? The fact is that we've built a system where, if you murder a single person, you'll be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law (a bit more nuance on that later, though), but if you create a system that kills thousands, there will be no consequences at all (and likely a good deal of profit).

What does this have to do with Capitalism per the title of this section? Well, contrary to popular belief, Capitalism isn't a system of supply and demand, that's just a tenet of economics, Capitalism is a system in which the means of production (Capital) are exclusively controlled by private individuals to be used for their own personal interests. Unlike in a system like Monarchism, for example, where power resides with the monarch personally and those who are given it by the monarch, or Fascism, where power resides with a specifically defined ethnonationalist group personified by a single leader, or Democracy, where power resides ultimately with the people expressed through their direct vote or representatives, in a Capitalist system, power resides with the individuals who are able to own the greatest amount of Capital who can then use that wealth to gain further power.

In other words, far from being pawns in the system who are simply carrying out fiduciary duties, the capital class, in fact, holds the power to change the system itself in our Capitalist system. Moral responsibility increases with the amount of power a person has over a given situation, and the corporate executives and major shareholders who enact harmful policies are not helpless but, in fact, have a great deal of personal power over the situation in which they are enacting policies. They're not just enacting policies for their company, but have the ability to alter the laws under which those policies are carried out.

In this way, they have much greater control over their actions and the consequences thereof than most people and, thus, greater moral responsibility. The fact that the law assigns them no responsibility at all is something that will either need to be rectified or it will lead to the delegitimization of the law itself.

PUBLIC OPINION

Honestly, the outpouring of public support for the alleged killer in this case seems to have been shocking for much of the upper class of this country, which shows how disconnected they've become from broader public opinion. The fact that the upper class doesn't realize how broadly they are hated (across party lines!) is a testament to how much effort they have put into creating a bubble around themselves that keeps out unpleasant opinions.

Look, public debate tends to focus around issues of politics, not class. The news is full of talk about trans issues, foreign policy, education policy, and a thousand other issues, but there's no real reporting on the divide between the wealthy and powerful and everyone else. There's a good reason for this, the wealthy and powerful own the news outlets and decide what topics are subject to public debate; their money protects them from uncomfortable realities.

And it's not just the news, money attracts those who want money. The person who goes to work at a job where they interact personally with a multi-millionaire or a billionaire isn't going to be the kind of person to tell them off or talk about uncomfortable things; the low-paid janitors and cleaners need the job and the middle-managers and other aides want to climb the ladder! Unless a wealthy person makes a concerted effort to seek out uncomfortable opinions, they're likely never to be exposed to them.

And, let's be clear, hatred for the wealthy and powerful is widespread across the political spectrum. Trump and the billionaires in his social circle may not think his diatribes against "elites" includes them, but the average person certainly includes them in that group. Those on the right and left of our political spectrum may have different ideas on how to address it, but I would say that the vast majority of Americans agree that corporations and the wealthy have far too much power in our society and that something needs to be done to address this. The longer this does not happen, the greater acceptance there is among the public that more extreme methods may be required.

I should also be clear here that I, personally, think that these kinds of actions are morally wrong and should be punished, but it is still important that we, especially those with the power to do something about it, are aware that my view may no longer be in the majority.

POLICING

Quick, do you know what the unsolved murder rate in New York City is? It's around 50%, 47% in 2023 according to city statistics. That's right, more than 400 of the estimated 800 murders every year in New York City will never even result in an arrest, much less a conviction, for the perpetrator. NYPD isn't unique here, FBI data shows that only about half of all murders nation-wide will actually result in an arrest.

This isn't inevitable either, the rate used to be much higher. In 1970, 85% of all reported murders resulted in the arrest of a suspect. So what happened?

Well, one thing that probably happened was that police started spending less time chasing murderers. As of 2019, LA County Sheriffs reported spending 88% of their time on officer initiated traffic stops and only 11% of that was on reasonable suspicion of a crime. In Riverside, it was 83% of their time with only 7% of that based on reasonable suspicion of a crime. In other words, cops are increasingly spending the vast majority of their time doing things other than trying to find criminals.

But what did we see recently? Well, we saw a murderer who left basically no clues as to his identity be found in less than a week due to police spending a huge amount of hours reviewing surveillance footage from around the city, searching the area around where the crime occurred, and communicating with the public to get more information. In other words, all of the things they DON'T do for the vast majority of murders in the city.

The fact that more than half of murders in NYC go unsolved isn't some immutable fact of nature, it's a result of choices made about the priorities of police time, and we've just seen that they can absolutely make a different choice and that it works! Pressure about the nature of policing in this country probably isn't going to abate anytime soon.

HEALTH INSURANCE COMPANIES

Finally, it's worth taking a moment to talk about health insurance companies and why they, more than all of the other parts of our health care system, are uniquely hated. Lots of people have made the very valid point that health insurance companies are only one part of what is an extremely dysfunctional system and that their share of the profits in this system are actually fairly small. So why all the hatred for health insurance companies instead of, say, doctors or hospitals?

Well, it's fairly simple. Doctors or hospitals may gouge you, but only health insurance companies make decisions that lead directly to denial of care. It's a matter of incentives, hospitals want to give you more stuff, as do doctors. The only part of our health care system with an incentive to deny you care or make you use less stuff is the insurance company which has to pay for all of that stuff with reduced profits.

And, look, the fact that United Healthcare is one of the most profitable companies in the country while the people it covers don't get care they need is certainly something to be concerned about, but this is bigger than just one company. Hospitals and doctors may gouge you, and that price-gouging distorts the economy and causes the systemic issues we see, but the insurance companies are the messengers here. Even if UHC was a non-profit and spent every penny it earned on patient care, it would still have to deny at least some care on the grounds that it simply does not have enough money to cover everything and that would make people dislike it.

You may be a little annoyed at the doctor who overcharges for their time or the hospital that tries to charge you $45 for a single Tylenol, but the health insurance company that refuses to cover chemotherapy for a cancer patient or a bypass for a cardiac patient or refuses to cover emergency care after the death of a loved one is likely to drive you into a fit of rage on a very different level even if all of the underlying decisions are made based on monetary issues.

Again, I'm not trying to absolve UHC or other health insurance companies, they certainly do more than enough on their own to add to the misery that is the American health care system, but there are a lot of people who are in the weeds of American health care and don't understand why the insurance companies are uniquely hated. Hopefully this helps clear that up.

#politics #us politics #economics #morality #ethics #united healthcare #ceo assassination #capitalism #corporations #policing #health insurance #long rant (tm)

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