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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?
Uh...isn’t the salient feature that Baldwin shot someone? If he weren’t producing, hiring, etc. I would expect him to face the exact same charge. Maybe the armorer would also have liability, but I doubt it would roll uphill to the producer.
Anyway,
I find it sort of amusing that you’ve reinvented an anti-death-penalty thought experiment, but followed it in the complete opposite direction. By assigning the maximum possible punishment to this crime, you have defined every other crime as lesser. Now our hypothetical amoral scientists have zero incentives to avoid lesser crimes like rape and murder—or worse ones like knowingly releasing such viruses! This is analogous to replacing all manslaughter offenses with mass murder. How would the incentives to be more careful stack up against those for murderers to be less selective?
It’s also worth considering that people still get sentenced to death, our current endpoint of the punishment scale. Assuming rational actors, they must be valuing their crime as worth an arbitrarily large punishment. What makes you think that amoral scientists wouldn’t make the same judgment even in the face of your choice of punishments?
Allowing for irrational actors, now...At some point, the Big Numbers round off to “very bad thing.” This gets multiplied by the eternal optimism of “this will never happen to me,” yielding an end result of “eh, probably fine.” Maybe the Eliezer Yudkowskys and Sam Bankman-Frieds of the world shut up and multiply correctly. I wouldn’t count on their coming to your same conclusion!
No. An actor is hired by a production company to perform a role with the tools they are given by the production company. Since most movies do not involve the actual killing of real people with real guns with real ammo, an actor's assumption would be that any firearm they are given to use as a prop during filming is non-lethal, and there is an existing apparatus of firearms-specific prop handlers who are hired by production teams to make sure that when an actor is handed a prop gun it is non-lethal and safe for use in make-believe scenarios. Now, my gun-enthusiast buddies will say that anyone handling a firearm is responsible for what happens with that firearm while they are handling it, but this is the POV of people who live in gun culture and are expecting to be using lethal weapons with live ammo. This is not the case with actors, who are more likely to be gun-ignorant as well as have their head at least half in a state of make-believe. It is the job of the production team to educate the relevant actors on proper gun-handling procedures and ensure the safety of the gun.
Now, that Baldwin was also a producer of this movie puts him farther up the chain of responsibility and liability. As movies often have several producers with different levels of on-set responsibility, if Baldwin as a producer is charged with a crime (criminal negligence seems more apt than manslaughter, in this case), that same should apply to all producers with on-set responsibilities as well as to the property masters and firearms advisors who put a live gun in the hand of an actor (who likely to be the least capable person on the set).
Of which, Baldwin, having worked on many movies where guns were used were well aware of.
A big issue in the Baldwin situation is that in the scene that was being shot, Baldwin was meant to be quickly drawing the gun. He was not meant to be firing it. If you look at the filming right before the incident happened, his finger is clearly inside the trigger guard and likely near or on the trigger itself. So the revolver should have never of been fired in the first place. It was his negligence by pulling the trigger. If he was in a scene wherein he was intended to "shoot" the gun, and that is when the negligent discharge happened I would have more empathy towards Baldwin's innocence. This is not the case, so the armorer failed by allowing live ammunition onto the set and Baldwin failed by negligently pulling the trigger of the revolver when the scene did not call for it. Both made critical errors, leading to the death of one and another injured, and both are justifiably going to be charged.
I mean, that's definitely an error, but realistically the armorer made the much bigger mistake. Most rules about gun safety, such as not pointing the gun at anyone, go out the window in movies and are replaced by "make sure the armorer knows what they're doing."
Honestly makes me wonder why they use real guns at all.
This is my question. What is the point? Build a replica without the ability to fire at all. You can with tech make a small fire at the end of the gun and then dub in the relevant sound effect later.
In a movie with a budget of 7 million about cowboys, the cost of special effects as against firing blanks et al may be cost prohibitive.
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