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Notes -
Alec Baldwin, the Lab Leak, and punishing maximal negligence
Alec Baldwin has been charged with manslaughter. We don’t know the nitty gritty details yet, but let’s consider the following possibility. Baldwin, as someone who funded and produced the movie, was ultimately responsible for choices in hiring. He hired someone insufficiently skilled at risk management on set. In addition to hiring and retaining someone whom a reasonable producer would consider insufficiently skilled, he acted negligently on set through pressure, which led to the death of an employee.
Whatever the actual details, there’s a plausible avenue by which Baldwin has serious moral blame in regards to manslaughter. The details that come out later will obviously dictate whether this occurred, but we can imagine a case in which a producer possesses moral blame for the system of failsafes failing. Importantly, in cases where the risks are high (a gun misfiring), greater care is morally warranted. Our expected duty to exercise care is proportional to the potential of harm.
Following from this example, I assert that we should develop a legal principle to maximally punish anyone involved in catastrophic lab leaks (those resulting in millions to tens of millions of death). [paragraph edited for clarity] We should do this regardless of the material facts of individual responsibility of a lab leak. This is because the risk of leak is of such significance that it belongs to a new category of risk:care ratio concerns. It is the principle of reasonable care and deterrence but amplified to the amount of harm involved. The amount of harm that a Covid leak created (implying that the lab leak theory is true) is more than what inspired the Nuremberg Trials. Playing with genetically modified coronaviruses, specifically enhanced for virulence, constitutes such a threat against the human race that every single person involved should have been made to underwrite their life as a guarantee in case of leak. Not for a lifetime in jail, or capital punishment — the guarantee should have been that the State would use medieval punishment on you for the rest of your life. The scientists who worked and funded and stamped the research should have been so certain that a leak would never happen that they literally stake endless, limitless torture for the rest of their life if it leaked. Only this level of deterrent punishment would befit the level of care required to deal with the potential harm of COVID. I am suggesting a moral principle that would prevent future leaks, applied to future cases, to stave off the risk of leak catastrophe.
If Baldwin, in acting unreasonably in hiring or setting workplace culture, can be responsible for one death, how much more care should scientists who work with virulent viruses exercise? Viruses that will kill 200 million by the end of the century are inconceivably more risky than anything that can happen in normal everyday business life. The risk to care ratio must be maximal because only this level of deterrence is sufficient to encourage a reasonable level of care. The whole point of Law is that foreseeing punishment deters behavior. It’s not just that Baldwin ought to have practiced sufficient care; it’s that everyone in Baldwin’s place should foresee a punishment from failing to exercise sufficient care. Baldwin deserves a punishment in accordance to his level of negligence, and everyone in Baldwin’s position must foresee a similar punishment for similar negligence.
Do you think scientists would still work on virulent chimera viruses if they had to stake endless torture on the possibility that it is leaked? If they wouldn’t, doesn’t this simply prove that research this risky should never be done?
So is that the only thing that you want to punish with medieval torture, or is there anything else? I'm thinking of tobacco executives as an immediate candidate for someone who under any principled law you are proposing should go right after the lab leak overseers into the torture pit. Considering the tribal valence of it, how are you planning to argue against the other tribe enacting medieval torture on you or your champions, once they are in power?
More pragmatically, you probably aren't going to be successful at capturing scientists who oversaw a lab leak wherever they were in the world. If your country is the one that passes the law you want, all scientists who could imagine themselves committing an accident of this magnitude - which may be everyone who is good in this field - will move to Russia, China, or whatever other pick of adversary does not share in your bloodthirst and will not extradite, and then you can act surprised when COVID 2.0 turns out to have a mysterious affinity for people from your country. (I'm not a biochemist, but I don't know if, were I one, I would feel particular moral trepidations about doing horrible things to people who approve of subjecting me to a lifetime of medieval torture for an honest mistake, however dire the consequences.)
Why do you see tobacco as anything halfways comparable? Tobacco use is known to be harmful and the harm is something that people willingly exchange in return for a pleasant experience. In the case of a tobacco executive in the 60’s lying about the dangers of smoking, this is mitigated by the expectation that corporations lie in America. If a regulatory body were tasked with doing research on tobacco, and it knowingly declared tobacco free from danger in the face of overwhelming evidence, and this ruling was in effect for thousands of years, then yes I would see it as similar. But a reasonable person can find the studies and dispute the government consideration, whereas no one can opt out of getting COVID. So this is an essentially dissimilar metaphor in regards to risk and culpability.
If you’re saying that we should let mad scientists do mad research because otherwise they will do it in Russia, I disagree because of the risks of mad research, and would hope an international body is developed to oversee mad research.
You can't exactly opt out of passive smoking (certainly not in the '80s, unless you stayed home, which probably also would protect you against COVID), but fair enough about it being too dissimilar to work as a comparison. There's another analogy that has even more culture war juice in it, though, and which seems like an actual candidate for a way in which eroding the "no cruel and unusual punishment" norm would come around to bite the red tribe coalition. Global warming is something which a large majority of people actually believes has already or will cause millions of deaths, and a narrative has long taken root (the whole "Exxon internal memos produced accurate climate projections decades ago" thing) where its causation was not merely negligent but actively malicious. If "cause megadeaths by negligence or worse => lifelong torture" becomes the new norm, then I don't think that oil execs will make it for long, and a particularly triumphalist progressive coalition might be tempted to go for their Republican party enablers too.
It's a good opportunity to invoke that evergreen movie quote (the "law" in the US context, I guess, would be the 8th Amendment):
Well, that doesn’t work because oil actually has a lot of utility as well. Maybe we’ve killed millions as a result of oil but also saved billions. Who knows.
To date, has GoF produced any real utility?
I don't think the parent poster was proposing weighing the utility of it against COVID deaths, but even so, you're up against people who are much more numerous and better at creating narratives than you are. I'm sure they'll find some way to argue that GoF research produced utility, whereas oil executives just conspired to keep demand higher and externality pricing lower than it needed to be. When you are fighting against someone who controls the narrative, laws and principles, that is, elements of the narrative that the narrative-writer can not change except at a great cost, are your only protection. Why would you propose to abolish them, unless you are working off of a mental model of reality in which you have more power than you actually do? Are temporarily embarrassed NYT editors the new temporarily embarrassed billionaires?
(And, personally, I think removing the Schelling fence around torture causes sufficient harm in itself that the first people I would want to see tortured for a lifetime if that's how we start doing things are those who proposed doing that. Think of that story of the Greek tyrant with the Brazen Bull.)
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