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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!
It does appear likely that it is Baldwin's role as the producer that is the basis for the charge. The armorer has also been charged, and the state OSHA fined the production company for violating various firearms safety regulations. The OSHA chief was quoted as saying, "What we had, based on our investigators' findings, was a set of obvious hazards to employees regarding the use of firearms and management's failure to act upon those obvious hazards."
I think the opposite, in that otherwise other producers would have been similarly charged. Especially as Baldwins role as producer did not apparently involve hiring any of the people or overseeing them on set. Given that it would be weird to charge him specifically out of all the producers. Ryan Smith's production company was apparently the one that did that.
I think he was charged because he was the one with the gun in his hand.
Yes, it looks like you are right. The NY Times this am says:
and
And I suppose they might also argue that his knowledge of previous issues on set re guns served to enhance his duty.
Of course, that the DA claims such a duty exists does not mean that the duty does, in fact, exist. The first claim (“You should not point a gun at someone that you’re not willing to shoot,”) is clearly wrong in the special case of a movie production. Movie productions substitute other safety rules for that one, like "No live ammunition should be available" (a rule obviously impractical in other circumstances involving firearms).
That "absolute duty" (the "absolute" would indicate failure was itself proof of negligence -- though still not necessarily criminal negligence) seems unlikely to be supported by NM case law.
They also substituted the safety rule of “say ‘cold gun’ to the talent when you hand over an unloaded weapon” for the well-known safety rule “every gun is always loaded, unless you yourself have checked.” Together, those two substituted rules allowed one bullet onto the set, into the gun, and ultimately through the victim.
The moment anyone on set heard about the accidental discharge two days before, the standard rules should have been reinstated.
No; the substituted rules were violated. One rule was "no live ammo on set" and another was "check the ammo before loading it into the gun". Both these were violated, but not by Baldwin. The source of the live ammo remains unclear, but it was the armorer's job to ensure it was not present and to check the ammo before loading it into the gun.
The standard rules for a movie production are the substituted ones. The earlier accidental discharges were of blanks. One was caused when someone slipped while lowering the hammer -- in that particular revolver one must lower the hammer by pulling the trigger and holding the hammer back. Another was apparently caused by dropping a rifle loaded with a blank. Both of these can happen without any rule violations at all, merely unavoidable human fallibility.
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Of course not. But we are discussing the DA's rationale for bringing the charges,not whether Baldwin is guilty.
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