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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?
Do you really want bad things to not happen or just really really want to torture those you deem to be evil? Proposing severe punishment as a disincentive is hardly the newest idea out there, if anything it's literally 'medieval torture'.
This point of view is aesthetically repulsive for me for a myriad of reasons, failing the veil of ignorance test, giving the state just about infinite power, the naked bloodthirst being just a few of them.
However, I'll give you a modern counter-example. The Mexican drug cartels are no strangers to torture. They flay, burn and dismember their own members for things as trivial as stealing 13$ worth of drugs (Source: Sinaloa chainsaw execution), failing to scout properly, or leaving the cartel. And rival cartel members, even lackeys such as drug runners are dealt with extreme prejudice. And people still keep on fucking with the cartels and joining them.
I suggest you watch 'Funkytown gore' (a famous video of said torture) to acquaint yourself with what your proposal actually looks like. If you can watch the video without flinching. And be okay with innocents sometimes being subjected to that as a cost of doing business. And be okay with a potential family member being subjected to that because the n-th order effects of his actions are death, finally if you are okay with yourself being subjected to that for working on the retroactive wrong science. I can take you seriously. Else you are just a RETVRN larper who sounds like a clown to anyone who knows anything about History and how bad things used to be.
These are actually the same thing. The first is just the logical explanation, and the second is the internalized, evolved taste for justice that certain human populations naturally develop. The first is the deterrent theory and the second is the retributive theory of justice, but they are not mutually exclusive. I believe they are the same thing! “Did you really kill Hitler to prevent evil, or to feel good about killing Hitler?” Yes!
Yes, it’s the basis of every civilization’s deterrence to extreme defection of standards. Let’s apply it to a novel use case!
To me this sounds just a little naive. We are already implementing terror and torturous death on nations that affect our geopolitical dominance. We are fine with starving Yemenis and dead Syrian children. We are okay with pregnant women in Afghanistan being foreseeably-accidentally killed so that we destabilize these areas. It is the very basis of American foreign policy in the Middle East, and before that Cambodia and Vietnam. We commit more torture today (all of its moral residue, st least) than a medieval kingdom. We shouldn’t ignore the widespread use of it just because a video on liveleak made us feel icky. The barbarity of torture and torturous death is a fact of life in geopolitics and must be accepted.
So what about those who feel a very strong internalized distaste for law-and-order types who fantasise about extreme punishments, especially when the extreme punishments happen to always be for members of their outgroup? Many of them probably think that your viewpoint is pretty evil, and would at least be willing to go as far as locking you up in solitary if that were the only way to stop you from actualising it. Do you figure their feelings on the matter are also an evolved taste that certain human populations naturally develop which reflects a logical viewpoint, or do only your feelings align with the truth?
Perhaps some might even like the idea of torturing the would-be torturer. Would you prefer to fight to the death against those people (who, if they don't have a numerical advantage over you, certainly don't seem to have that much of a disadvantage) over who gets to get tortured in the end, or do you think you could come to a compromise where neither of you tortures and you could resolve your differences in a different way?
I would definitely prefer to live in a country with the reasonable amount of Risk-Care assessment that (per the view in my post) encourages saving millions of lives from a torturous death. If someone disagrees I am completely unbothered — what can I do but express my argument? This discussion is not about the most efficient practical form of procuring the legal remedy in the courts, it’s higher order than that. To me, wanting to do maximal evil to a person that wants to effectively minimize maximal harm (and torturous death) does sound like a perverse and antisocial worldview. But maybe you can get a society up and running on such principles. I would listen to someone argue that this leads to the best results, despite my doubt.
The laziest nontrivial argument to do whatever it takes to stay torture-free is that we are in a society that at least tries its darndest to maintain a pretense of shunning deliberate torture even if it is for the greater good, and all the most recent ones that did not maintain this pretense seem pretty terrible to live in.
I do concede that wanting to have all those who advocate living by the sword die by the sword and only then abolish swords is somewhat gratuitously brutal, and I'd personally be quite contented with merely locking up anyone who was involved in introducing torture. (Note that this is not to say I want to lock anyone up for arguing for it, as long as it is not implemented. That would run up against other principles.)
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This argument proves too much. It can apply to any type of punishment for anything. If you want to lock people up for bank robbery, someone could equally well say "what if someone thinks that viewpoint is pretty evil and is willing to lock you up for expressing it"?
The symmetry with bank robbery doesn't hold, because "jailing bank robbers is unjust" is a minority position, and opposition to any jailing at all is even more so. On the other hand, opposition to torture in general is (mercifully, in my eyes) still mainstream, as is the belief that extreme punishment for negligence is unjust. Argue for jailing bank robbers and most people will nod along and no norms will be changed. Argue for torturing scientists who oversaw major accidents, and you will only leave us with additional torture, because abstract principles like "no torture" are always softer than tribalism like "if we torture, it better be the outgroup". This will neither be torture that you want (because you and your people are in a minority (as weighted by power) disagreed with ~ despised by the majority) nor torture that I want (because I don't want there to be torture).
If many people think like you this is circular reasoning; if nobody supports it because it's a minority position, that makes it a minority position even if it wasn't already.
I'm also skeptical that you'd stop objecting to torture if it proved to be popular.
This argument could be made for other things too. It has not, for instance resulted in the death penalty, or even long sentences, being applied tribally.
I wouldn't, but I never claimed that I would. However, I'd stop being able to use this particular argument towards my interlocutor. If torture were popular, I would consider his position merely immoral, and I don't think that this is the forum for trying to shift someone's value function. Given that it is as unpopular as it is, though, I believe his position is not only immoral but also instrumentally bad for his own ends, and I am trying to use that as an argument to get him to drop it. Is there a problem with having ulterior motives (which I think I'm being pretty upfront about) in trying to stop someone from making a mistake?
edit:
Interesting point. I don't think those two quite satisfy the criteria to be a perfect model of torture, because the death penalty seems to only be applied to people who are too low-class to matter to either tribe in every country where I'm equipped to judge its tribalism and there was never an established principle against long sentences (and there are examples where they were applied tribally, e.g., famously, interbellum Germany), but you are probably right that my expectation that it will inevitably become so needed more careful thought. I still think that the circumstance that the proposed motivating use will be interpreted as blatantly tribal makes it highly likely.
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