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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?
Should we really punish people for everything that goes wrong? Can we make a movie if the producer is charged with murder if someone dies? If the principal of a school is responsible for all injuries on the playground, the result is going to be obese kids who aren't allowed to play fun games. Developing new a new medication costs well over a billion, and much of this cost is due to an extreme fear of someone having an adverse side effect. Meanwhile, lots of good ideas for medications get scrapped due to the cost of developing them into products. Humanity has invested far more in coal power than nuclear power in the past 30 years because of the extreme fear of another Chernobyl and the impossibility of insuring nuclear power. Because of that, thousands of people die every day due to coal pollution, which is causing far worse damage than Chernobyl ever did. If anything we are being too cautious and not accepting enough of risk.
If I keep a lion caged on my property but a freak lightning strike causes the cage to open and results in my lion killing someone, I should go to jail. Owning a lion is an ultrahazardous activity, and to reduce the social risk we should make lion owners strictly liable for all the harm their lion causes even if, given that the person had a lion, he behaved with proper caution. Aiming a gun at a person and pulling the trigger is also an ultrahazardous activity.
Legally-speaking, "ultrahazardous activities" to which strict liability attaches are those activities where harm frequently results even if due caution is taken. The prototypical example is blasting or other explosives work - even if you do everything right, you don't know where all the debris is going, or what effects other properties of the explosion could cause (e.g., there's a famous case where the shockwave from dynamiting-open an irrigation canal caused a bunch of minks on a nearby fur farm to freak out and eat their own young; the blaster was held responsible for the lost profits from the devoured baby minks, even though the blast wave wasn't itself harmful to anything, and the mink freakout was unforeseeable, because blasting is just that dangerous.).
We don't impose strict liability to incentivize due caution; we impose it because someone has to swallow the inevitable losses caused by ultrahazardous activities, and society has decided that the person/entity engaging in the activity is the best option.
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If lion-keeping had a small chance of gestating a cure for cancer, would this change your calculus?
Your lion is high risk for your neighbours, but also high reward.
Alec Baldwin wasn't hanging around with loaded guns for shits and giggles: he was trying to make ART. Fairly prolefeed-tier art, true, but do you want to live in a safetyist world where no-one dares pick up a paintbrush for fear the chemicals in their paint might flick into someone's mouth and cause freak allergy anaphylactic shock?
He violated onset safety rules. Pointing a gun at someone is not done as a regular part of making movies; guns are pointed off angle and camera tricks and editing make up for it. And armorers normally check every gun before every scene. Both of these normal safety precautions were skipped here, to my knowledge, so manslaughter/negligent homicide/depraved heart murder/whatever the case may be charges make a lot of sense.
That society is a safetyist mess does not mean that safety should be completely disregarded.
Well, yes it is... stochastically. For every time a man is close to a gun, some proportion of the time he will point it at another person, just as a probabilistic fact. You can decrease the amount of times this happens by detering said behaviour through punishment. But you may rapidly see that the side-effects of the deterrents become more pathological than the things they were meant to deter: namely, fewer movies will get made because movie sets need more safety commissars, which are both expensive and obstructive.
How many N movies are you willing to sacrifice to decrease "actor really does point gun at someone else" by M%?
For me the number is negative, because I prefer "watching movies" to "infinitesimal increases in teamster safety".
Less strawmanning, please. I'm not saying COMPLETELY disregard, merely disregard much much more. And if you think society is a safetyist mess, you apparently agree with me, making it doubly odd that you would strawman me.
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This is simply not true.
Indeed, and this was supposed to have been done, and was claimed to have been done (but clearly was not, or not correctly)
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I can scarcely believe this to be true. I have seen probably hundreds of scenes where a gun was literally touching against someone’s head.
Fake guns and special effects go a long way. Even firing a blank in that position will kill someone.
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Are you sure they were actually filmed using a gun and not a prop designed to look like one?
No, but if that is possible (not saying it isn't, it certainly sounds like a good idea) why are real guns ever used? Why would anyone expect a real gun to be used?
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It literally doesn’t matter; that’s the whole point here. Baldwin was also sure that the item he is using is a perfectly safe prop. How is he more culpable than the other actors who held the prop guns to other people’s heads?
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