What makes this more interesting is that he clearly believed it was safe. So he wasn’t necessarily unethical. It is more that he was a bad engineer and a poor judge of risk.
Are you still unethical when you don't know about your incompetence?
Can you be unethical if you had no ability to know that what you do is unethical?
You're correct that reality can be more complicated, and it depends. I can imagine a scenario, e.g. the plot of "Manchester by the Sea" which doesn't seem completely unethical. I find it hard to believe in this case that he was that incompetent. I think he took what he believed to be a calculated risk, and I'm guessing he didn't go around broadcasting that information to the other people on the tour.
Edit: I mean just read the waiver: https://nypost.com/2023/06/23/read-the-death-waiver-doomed-t...
It speaks for itself.
>2. A portion of the operation will be conducted inside an experimental submersible vessel. The experimental submersible vessel has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body and may be constructed of materials that have not been widely used in human occupied submersibles.
If you don't, you knew and accepted the risk.
Risk = probability x severity.
From that link, they characterized the severity (death) but not the probability. Saying "you may die" is different from saying "your have a 50% chance of dying." My guess is nobody had a good estimate for the probability so nobody could have accurately communicated the risk.
I don't know. This implies a high probability to me.
E.g., one of the problems with the Shuttle disasters is that the implied risk was understood differently at various levels. (Making numbers up here but directionally accurate) After the fact, managers thought there was a 1/1000 risk of catastrophic failure while engineers put it a 1/172.
>2. A portion of the operation will be conducted inside an experimental submersible vessel. The experimental submersible vessel has not been approved or certified by any regulatory body and may be constructed of materials that have not been widely used in human occupied submersibles.
I would argue it is always unethical to ignore the advice of experts when putting other people's safety on the line.
based on communique both to and from the CEO, the CEO did, in fact, know, that the vessel was not certified to do what it was doing, and that there were safety risks to it
> Authorities say a 28-year-old Texas man was attacked and killed by an alligator “almost immediately” after being warned by a bystander not to swim in the water, replying “fuck that alligator” before jumping in.
https://www.gawker.com/fuck-that-alligator-man-killed-second...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mens_rea
You can definitely be convicted of one, though!
The cop should just give you a warning.
Unfortunately, he killed those other people because no one could convince him that he was wrong.
He thought it was safer than it was.
But I don't think he thought it was close to a 0% chance of death.
It's clear that he knew it was somewhat risky.
It failed after like 25 dives which means around a ~4% failure rate.
I'd hope he thought it had less than a 1% failure rate.
Who knows what the true failure rate is. Maybe they got really lucky, and it actually had a higher failure rate. Maybe they got extra unlucky. Who knows.
I just can't fathom people would pay $250k for a miserable time and a decent shot at death.
Moreover, both 1% and 4% are horrible failure rates for anything meant to carry passengers. Example: the risk of dying in a commercial plane crash is 1 in 11 million [1]. The risk of dying while skydiving is less than 1 in 300,000 per jump.
This guy was taking extremely unreasonable risks.
[1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/planecrash/risky.html
[2] https://dzoneskydiving.com/articles/how-many-people-die-skyd...
It's easy to agree post-ex, after he went and killed himself and 4 other people.
He probably thought the failure rate might've been closer to 1 in 1000. That still seems WAY too high for me, but maybe for him that was fine.
Either way, he was almost certainly wrong, and it was much higher than that.
Would he have done it if he thought it had a 4% chance of failure? Maybe once. But I doubt 25 times...
Rich folks pay upward of 70k for Everest expedition, where local personal Sherpas babysit them from basecamp/Kathmandu all the way to the top with oxygen, unless SHTF in some form. That's 2+ months of more or less suffering, living above 5000-6000m long term ain't fun for most. Metabolism goes to hell, wounds heal slower, body is clearly struggling and so is mind. I did experience empty mindness above 6k myself and you just focus on getting goals done asap and survival.
Everest has some 2-3% fatality rate, consistently. I'd say it may not be the exactly same crowd but similar mindset that gets attracted to these things.
1% is horrible. You'd hope for robust systems where individual failures are mitigated by support systems. And even then, five nines doesn't feel so great when the cost could be so severe.
> I just can't fathom people would pay $250k for a miserable time and a decent shot at death.
That poor kid didn't even want to go. He was terrified of the thing and was going to make his dad happy for father's day.
When failure means instant death that would be a pretty awful failure rate for a commercial product meant to take paying customers from the general public. And even if meant to take well informed researchers and engineers.
If failure meant "Oops, the ballast dropped prematurely, looks like we're going to have to cut this dive short", that's one thing, but when it means "You're going to be crushed by immense pressure in a millisecond", that's quite another.
My suspicion is based on the fact that I can't find any other stories of deep sea vehicles failing and killing their passengers in the last 40 years. DSV Alvin for example has completed 5,000 dives with 0 fatalities.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jJ_SSU-ocU
He mentioned since 1960, but unclear if that was because that's when the deep sea submersible exploration started, or something happened in 1960.
That makes OceanGate's sub seem like a uniquely incompetent design.
OceanGate just ruined a 60 year perfect track record for an entire field of engineering.
I take your meaning, but I'm just laughing at the idea of a 1% failure rate. If airliners had a 1% failure rate, there would be hundreds of thousands of crashes every year. Experimental craft don't need airliner failure rates of course, but 1% still seems too high for anything with human passengers.