It's baffling to me that people are calling this a righteous cleanse when it was purely the murder of an innocent man with a family.
I think all of these things can be true. It is possible for one person to be ambivalent about the killing of a bad man, acknowledge that he had a family and that is unfortunate, and accept that the system is flawed and that systematic change is required to materially improve things.
I agree it's fair to criticize executives who are responsible for suffering.
But I also think we have to be very careful with the messaging about that.
Because I don't want to live in a society where we think that violence is an acceptable solution to injustice.
It doesn't lead to a good place.
Yes, sometimes it's necessary. But very very very rarely.
Personally, I'm with you. I absolutely don't want justice delivered via a mob or a vigilante without due process or the other protections that a fair justice system is supposed to provide us with.
This is why it's so important that congress, police, prosecutors, judges, and even juries do their jobs. If the people have no legal, accessible, and effective means to get justice they might resort to illegal means to get it. The longer people are denied justice, the more likely it is they'll take it into their own hands.
This election cycle nobody quite focused on healthcare; more abstract culture wars were in focus instead.
You can't blame that on congress and on judges etc. The whole society is responsible. The way we talk (or not talk) to our relatives and neighbors has profound effects on the society you'll live in
You don't want police to apply excessive force. You won't want innocent bystanders to be shot by the police. You don't want the police to hurt people just because they think they may be guilty, etc. Those things do happen and when they happen people get upset and rightfully so.
Anyway, it’s the State’s and regulations fault, as usual.
Understanding that the role of a CEO is essentially a replaceable cog in a vast and complex machine is beyond the capabilities of most people’s good-bad moral system, and so it’s easier to scapegoat one guy instead of looking at the deeper structure.
We spawned an emergent disembodied super-human organism called "society" that lives through the action of individual humans like an ant colony lives through the actions of individual ants.
But yet we have the strong need to put a human face on it. We need to attribute agency to something that has behaviour.
In order to explain phenomena like thunder, earthquakes etc, humans throughout history have often felt it much easier to imagine some "person in the sky" being the cause of it.
The same mechanism powers many conspiracy theories. "Global financial system that's hard to understand? Nah, it's just the Rothschilds".
Now, in some cases like CEOs of companies that do harm, it's harder to dismiss the individual responsibility, because there is a freedom of choice that the individual could do.
It's easier thus to pin the blame on that single cog rather than blaming the whole society for not voting the right people who would fix the problem at the root.
But ultimately, if that one cog would refuse to do harm then another person would take their place until the rules of the game would be patched to prevent that.
Punishing culpable people is effective only inasmuch it deters from the unwanted behaviour.
Letting people administer "justice" via violence is not conducive to a just and peaceful society. The side effects of letting that happen will backfire and will undo any "justice" improvements you may seek to achieve.
I think we all can personally loathe big bad CEOs and still think that murdering them is the wrong thing you do no matter what your moral theory is.
It's possible this CEO was fighting to reduce claim denial rates but was squeezed or cutoff from his legal team in every attempt. It's also possible he pushed to deny as often as possible. But until we have evidence, it seems a bit wild to attribute "willingness to work in an influential role at a company massively disliked" with complicity in crimes against humanity. And as you point out, it is never acceptable to use violence offensively against such a person, even if he was foaming at the mouth to hit the deny button daily.
10M is my number but I'm sure all the temporarily embarrassed billionaires on here would be shocked by such a low number.
Anything over that and I'd be quite happy to see them "adjusted" and all the cogs replaced.
Imagine if you were in a tribe of 100 and 1 person thought they should earn 40 times the other 99.
What do you think would happen in that tribe? Well that's what we've got now.
The average personal wealth of people in the top 1% is more than a thousand times that of people in bottom 50%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...
Eventually, they will reap what they sow.
There's a lot of space between "knowingly kills people for profit" and "collects user data from an app/works on a manipulative algorithm" which could make it easy for some people to pretend that they aren't doing "real" harm or to believe that the CEO was a "real problem" while they personally aren't.
I hope that the more people are held accountable for what they do (regardless of how that happens) it'll force others to do some self-reflection even if only out of a sense of self-preservation, but I'd be careful about generalizing too much. The people posting here are a pretty diverse lot, and you can find hypocrisy in any sufficiently large group. I wouldn't call HN a "glass house" but it's got a few big windows.
I'm all for changing the system, but this action likely won't do that.
Yes, all of "us" doing it industrial scale and getting paid for it are guilty. Not me, but maybe you.