The assassination of United Healthcare's CEO is a real life trolley problem, and a select few are trying to argue to save all lives while the train is going to kill the masses.
The assassination of United Healthcare's CEO is a real life trolley problem, and a select few are trying to argue to save all lives while the train is going to kill the masses.
It appears that in every thread about this event there is someone calling everyone else in the thread sick and twisted for not proclaiming that all lives are sacred and being for the death of one individual.
It really is a real life trolley problem because those individuals are not seeing the deaths caused by the insurance industry and not realizing that sitting back and doing nothing (i.e. not pulling the lever on the train track switch) doesn't save lives...people are going to continue to die if nothing is done.
Taking a moral high ground and stating that all lives matter is still going to costs lives and instead of it being a few CEOs it will be thousands.
I'd encourage everyone to be careful with this type of thinking, because I'm seeing it a lot. Characterizing situations as having only two unpleasant options ("two tracks" in this case) is a classic strategy to rationalize violence. Gangs use it, terrorist groups use it, and even governments trying to justify wars use it (e.g. remember Bush's "You're either with us or against us").
It's a textbook false dichotomy, and it's meant to make the least unpleasant option presented seem more palatable. This situation is not as simple as "either you're in favor of insurance companies profiting off of denied healthcare of millions or you're ok with murdering a CEO"
I see what you're getting at, but this isn't the trolly problem. The trolly problem is predicated on the idea that killing one will save many, but it's assumed that everyone involved is innocent. It's a philosophical question about moral choice; is inaction that allows many to die more moral than an action that directly kills one? If the one person being killed is somehow culpable for the deaths of the other people, that changes the entire equation.
Also, that's not even what happened here. One person was killed, but just as many people are going to die today because United Healthcare. No one was saved. Maybe if dozens of CEOs were gunned down in the streets, that would change something, but one dead CEO isn't going to do anything.
(And, to any moderators or FBI agents reading this, I'm of course not advocating for that. Can you even imagine? The ruling class that has been crushing the American working class for decades suddenly getting put down like rabid dogs? With the very weapons that the gun manufacturers allowed to flood our streets in order to maximize their profits? Makes me sick just to
fantasizethink about it.)It's more like "We found the guy pulling the lever on the trolley problem, only his trolley problem is 'people die or I get less money', and he has the trolley run over the people every time"
Unfortunately, there's a long line of twats behind him drooling over their chance to make the trolley run over human beings in exchange for money, so killing him doesn't really have the 'trolley running over people averted' effect that the trolley problem is usually based around. You're just punishing a shithead killer by killing him. Which, while hilarious, lacks the moral quandary that the trolley problem is meant to highlight, since no one is actually saved.
It's one of those things where the institutions of society can and must genuinely pursue the killer (albeit not at the level they actually are, expending a disproportionate amount of resources compared to if one of us commoners was killed), but if I saw the person who killed the CEO, I didn't.
People in the comments seem to be arguing if this will or will not save lives. I don't really care if it does. I think it's ironic that there's a crowd of people arguing that human life is precious and we can't celebrate this guy's death when the guy in question is the antithesis of that philosophy; he dedicated his life to profiting off of the suffering of others. I'm glad to see him go. There are many more I wish would follow.
I mean, if this was some dictator of a poor country slowly squeezing his citizens for money so they were hungry, some dying of starvation, and had shitty infrastructure so he can jaunt off to holidays in his private jet and live in a mansion with private guards, nobody would be saying this guy deserved to live. But a CEO squeezing sick people and their families for money, actively shortening lifespans and QoL... he's fine, let him off the hook?
This has been reported a few times for inciting violence. While it is walking a line, I don't see OP asking for anyone to be harmed. It was presented in the context of a popular thought experiment. Other posts with the trolley problem often include wealthy people in the scenarios, so I think there is good precedence for keeping this post up.
I agree that this post is uncomfortable and possibly insensitive due to timing as someone has actually died and this post is questioning the value of that death. Many fields of economics assign a monetary value to human life, which similarly makes people feel uncomfortable, but those are valuable conversations to have.
I thought this through a bit and try to error on the side of keeping posts up, but I make mistakes and I am open to feedback. If you want to give anonymous feedback you leave a report (I can't see who writes reports but presumably admins can).
EDIT: Deep breath everyone. Just to be clear, I greatly value people that make reports, I think we all should, its an important part of the ecosystem.
The patterns of behavior between shareholders, boards of directors, and executives is what's killing people. The same role can be re-cast with different actors.
It's not that CEOs need to die, it's that that larger pattern of behavior that gets rich by killing people needs to end. Maybe this spooks other people who are part of that larger pattern into stopping, maybe it makes them do it more, stealthier, and with bodyguards. It's hard to say.
At the very least, we should all jump at every chance to help things without hurting anybody, wherever we do find it. "Necessary violence" comes with a big ol heap of plausible deniability, and it's a pretty big ask for somebody to handle it responsibly.
The justification will be alluring even in circumstances where it is not legitimate.
- this will save precisely zero lives
- you ignore the broader impact of allowing brazen broad-daylight murder to be endorsed by the public under any conditions. It is not just this one life
- insurance is a mess and I am sure this guy was a dick, and that UHC denies plenty of claims that should be accepted. But at risk of pointing out the obvious, an insurance company that never denies any claims will go bankrupt immediately, and would therefore result in many more deaths since nobody would be covered.
Don't worry he'll be replaced with someone just as bad by the end of next week and they still have the same policies in place now that they did on Tuesday, it's like the trolley problem but the "diversion" split the train so it could kill both sides of the track and they'll recouple the cars on the other side.
[off topic]
Back in the day, I heard a lecture on the tactics of terrorist groups.
The IRA was particularly effective in assassinations. People thought they had an vast army of trained killers on hand.
Actually, the number of shooters was small, maybe fifty in all.
What made them so dangerous was that they had a powerful 'rear echelon.'
When the shooter arrived in town, he'd have three or four drivers waiting for him, a choice of safe houses, and more than one doctor to go to if he were to be injured.
A nurse sub, because they always seem to have the inside healthcare scoop, posted active litigation on the guy. Something about stock dumping in advance of stock value drops, I know very little about trading or the lingo, such that shareholders lost money. And then he died outside a shareholder meeting. Speculation, but so is all of this.
That said, social contagion factors still apply. The idea is sticking with people, as scary as that thought is.
No, they could stack the bodies of executives high enough to build a retaining wall, and the current system will still refuse to learn any fucking lessons. Our country has an extreme addiction to profits over people.
The solution is single-payer not-for-profit nationalized health care. The stuff that mature, rational nations do as a matter of daily routine.
Socialism is not a dirty word. We need to learn that lesson, first.
Unfortunately, the new administration will make things much worse. And the incompetent reality show cast of an administration will blame Biden and the "deep state" for all the misery and suffering they cause. And the morons in the Cult of 47 will believe them.
The USA is more broken than a folk hero with a gun can fix. Though, at least he has us all talking about it.
All lives are sacred? Tell that to the healthcare industry in the USA, it is a massive shit show and an out of control dumpster fire. The number one cause of personal bankruptcy in the USA is directly related to healthcare. Someone buy the shooter a ticket to Brazil or a decent country without extradition to the USA. The health insurance companies has more blood on their hands.
They’re being manipulated. I lost my dad to these fucking ghouls. I texted my mom a message making fun of this dude getting shot and my mom took the side of the CEO and said I’m terrible for wishing death on someone.
He is one of many in the system who killed father and my moms defending him? All she does all day is watch liberal mainstream media who are all slobbing his knob about how this is a tragedy. She’s toast, she’s totally brainwashed by them.
not a terrible point really, but it's also important to remember how quickly "kill bad guy to save many good guy" can turn into some government just labeling anyone who disagrees with them a bad guy and killing them, or can turn into anarchy. either way preventing murder from taking place, however justified, is an important part of what keeps society from collapsing.
Imagine thinking there's a "right" answer to the Trolley Problem.
This isn't technically the trolly problem, sorry to be pedantic. But the trolly problem is not in the deaths either track would cause, but in the decision to actively pull the lever and make yourself responsible for the outcome. Inaction means allowing what will be to be.
Eg, if the train is heading towards three people, and you can pull the lever to send it towards one, congratulations, you saved two lives. BUT you just made yourself responsible for the murder of one. Whereas before, you would not have been responsible for the death of the three.
Doesn't matter how dressed up the problem is, involvement means making yourself responsible for murder.
Killing a CEO is still doing nothing about the deaths caused by the insurance industry. How would it save lives of people harmed by privatized healthcare? If anything, it makes that anti-private-healthcare crowd look like a bunch of murderous zealots and will drive away any sympathy, making the problem worse. See: effect on indian raids on views of Native American rights, effect of Hamas attacks on views regarding Palestine, etc.
This is more like you let the train go and kill 5 people, or you pull the lever and kill one person, but that track loops back around onto the same track and kills the 5 people anyway, and then keeps going and kills 5 more people just tied on the part of the track the train already passed.
Let's be real, many would pull the lever anyway because they just want to feel like they did something about it.
... do you think killing a few CEOs is going to stop the shitty healthcare system we have? It's nowhere near that easy to fix this broken system. There are thousands of MBAs just waiting in the wings to take over and do the exact same things.
It's not a solution, it's a reaction, and it doesn't fix shit. Just escalates an already volatile situation.
That's a nice intellectual way to package the immediate thrill people feel when someone does something really violent they wish they had the guts to do. No, no, no, we're not like that, we're the enlightened ones, just rationally weighing one life against many! But be honest, it's like Spock backing off from his emotion outburst of happiness when he realized Kirk was still alive after thinking he'd killed him. No, I'm simply gratified that Starfleet didn't lose a valuable officer!
The political system needs to change, killing CEOs will change nothing. They are just some random corpo people with a good work history and education that get paid well to act in the interest of shareholders. Nothing will change with this death. The US public just seems too ignorant about this massive issue. The US is a democracy and if the public actually pushed for strong healthcare reform and didn't vote for someone who wants to cut healthcare benefits they could get improvement. All I see is radical violence LARPing that leads to nothing and some people acting all high and mighty acting self just which argue to kill like the top 1% and redistribute it and demonize them ignoring the fact that the masses aren't behind them. This is lemmy, this is not real life! The chaos this causes just leads to more suffering without a solution. And a random guy who had the job of CEO died because he acted as he was supposed to in his job. Returning value for shareholders, since if he doesn't he gets replaced with the next guy.
Yeah, no way this was like normal cases where estranged wives or business rivals hire hit men.
Gonna leave this here:
This is not a trolly problem. Insurance companies are companies ir they are designed to maximize profit. That is the problem. The objective of insurance companies is to make a profit not save people's lives.
I'm arguing that death squads of one v one are like death squads of fifty v one.
That is not a country that I want to live in. That country, the death squad country, will kill more than thousands.
But whatever, OP. It is just one must actually occupy the moral high ground to claim it. And assassination is not a moral choice. But you do have a funny picture.
Haha.
This smells like the second amendment argument about defending against a tyrannical government. Please, take inventory of materiel and finances before you go down that road.
I would argue there's another deep hypocrisy lying with people who insist such figureheads should be killed, but the only action they take is blathering about it on public forums.
Be the change you seek, go set an example if you think you know what's right.
But pitting us against the ruling class in this way isn't going to be a winning proposition. The best you'll get is a massive and severe security clampdown.
It's just poor taste to comment on someone's personal tragedy that has nothing to do with anon, more so gloating as if that event is instigating real reform and anon adding their precious opinions is a necessary part of the public discourse or whatever. It's not a trolley problem because anon can realize they don't have to give their two cents on every news item (the processing costs are higher these days) and that's the equivalent of "there's no trolley"
I love this "greater good" end-run-around the law that we follow as members of society; like premeditated murder of a soulless CEO is somehow okay.
How is ambushing ever not weak and cowardly? Swords at dawn if you're going to make it personal.
This is not how we solve this. Killers are tried and punished in accordance with laws we all agree on, here.
This is brutally flawed and simplistic thinking that doesn't survive real world scrutiny.
First of all, it is not a trolley problem because killing one CEO doesn't change anything, and you're not about to start a big enough wave of CEO killing to make a difference. He will be replaced with a different CEO, who will be just as greedy, who will now expense bodyguards and charge them back to your copays.
Secondly, we still don't know why he was killed. Have you considered that this could literally just be a case of corporate espionage and assassination for money? Even if he was killed by a disgruntled patient, that doesn't mean that patient did it on their own vs having their grief taken advantage of and manipulated by a corporate rival.
Thirdly, I really can't express how much this isn't a trolley problem given that you also literally saved zero lives by doing this. Really feels like you don't understand what the trolley problem is at a fundamental level.
No
Killing the evil fuck doesn't save any lives. The board (?) still had the meeting he was on his way to and they are still going to continue to deny basic human rights to the people who pay them for it.
The reality is that this is just yet another sign of immaturity and arrested development. I forget where I first heard it but... folk been watching WAY too much Steven Universe and similar warm and cozy shit. They think that by always taking the high road they are better people and the world will be a better place because if you do the right thing everyone else will.
When the reality is that people like the dead fuck prey on naivety like that.
If we ever find out who did it we are sure to find out they are also a pretty monstrous person. But, as satisfying as this has been, it changes nothing.
I honestly cannot believe how fucking stupid the reaction to this has been. I did see that reddit reacted similarly, so at least y'all are on par with the average redditor when it comes to intelligence. It relieves me to know that this is less an issue with Lemmy extremism and more an issue with basic reasoning skills.
How about you name one single human being, not even thousands, who has benefited from this contract killing? Whose life has been saved by "pulling this lever"? Explain yourself.
