What are you talking about? What "vigilante justice"? The innocent victim, Brian Thompson, was murdered by a lunatic. He was not an offender. It was no justice.
But since you've invited me to name the moral error, sure. Accepting a fiduciary responsibility to chase after profits in a context where that very clearly means finding ways to deny people access to healthcare is a moral error. If you can't ethically do a job you shouldn't take that job. At best you're lying to shareholders, at worst you're killing people. The only ethical path is to go find a different job.
It seems pretty obvious that opting into a position where you'll have to do that might make you unpopular with the humans.
I strongly encourage you to think very carefully about this. Once you do, you'll find that there are no simple answers: you'll always have limited resources, and you'll always have to deny care to some people, and in fact it will always include some people personally making the call to deny care to some people. Any system that actually exists, public or private, does this.
You would generally count them. Like, if you have three people in need of a ventilator and you only have two ventilators, then one person is getting denied a ventilator today.
> Any system that actually exists, public or private, does this.
That's true, and I don't have a problem with it. Tradeoffs have to happen. What I have a problem with is incentive structures that attribute greater success for the people at the top when they create outcomes that involve more death for the people at the bottom.
Plenty of systems which actually exist don't congratulate leadership for reducing quality of care.
There's no fundamental reason why they have to be in a position where screwing the people who receive the care would ever be considered the ideal option. But that's how it is when you have a group of shareholders who have no stake in the quality of care. Thompson opted into a conflict of interest which need not exist in order to provide insurance.
Government-organized resource allocation is, more likely than not, bad to very bad.
The same problem does not apply to our social services (including health insurance) as they dont have to make profits at all costs.
In most insurance fields, it would be possible to only deny false claims. Take insurance of your house. The rates could be calculated that they can pay out all real damages to the full amount. Because the maximum damage amount is limited.
That's not true for health insurance, because the total possible damage (cost of treatments) is almost arbitrarily high, so that you cannot pay everything for everyone.
I don't want to defend the US system here. But it's not a problem that any country really solved, and one could argue about advantages and disadvantages of the different systems all day long.
The moral error is by refining and endorsing a company policy that went out of it's way to cheat people out of their due insurance, killing significant amounts of people as a result and ensuring suffering for even more.
Our legal system can't really address this, not until the electoral college gets disbarred or red state voters realize rejecting socialized health care hurts more than it helps.
Until that happens. things are going to get worse and people are going to get frustrated and start acting out. It's what happens when you have such a broken system.
Talking about "we don't do that in society" is ignoring the problem at it's core. You can't expect people to just obey the rules and respect law and order when it clearly isn't working for them or people they care about.
I think that Brian Thompson was a mass murderer. His actions as CEO put profit before people and caused many people’s lives to be lost.
Buck stop with him; between 2021 and 2022 he did that. Being the CEO and all.
Perhaps you're not well equipped to evaluate moral errors in the first place.
Here, for example, the parent poster brings up some statistic that some very specific category of insurance claim denial went up in some period. The allusion is that this is nefarious, and is a result of some specific action by the murder victim. The reader is supposed to interpret it this way. Of course, there's absolutely zero evidence for any of these claims, and when you lay it down like that, it sounds pretty stupid without anything backing this up.
Your comment is pretty clear example of the attitude around the case. People hate CEOs of companies that must make difficult decision, and so when they are murdered, they will twist themselves into pretzels to somehow justify that they had it coming.
That something harmful is legal or effectively legal is a necessary requirement for a vigilante action to morally acceptable.
And if people in their majority, in their stupidity or cleverness, reject your argument, isn't then vigilante action deeply anti-democratic?
I have a very old-style view, where courts provide systems that substitute for private vengeance and thus become legitimate by being willing to hear complaints of harm, so from my point of view, if a court hear the matter, the affected person can take whatever measures they wish, which of course has important consequences in cases of legal immunity-- when my view is taken, legal immunity is something one desperately wants to avoid having, because whoever has it must contend with private vengeance.
No, People hate CEO's making greedy, selfish, unnecessary decisions that cost lives and cause suffering.
Be honest.
That's fine. I think you exemplify the attitude that lead to Thompson's murder and will lead to many more similar incidents.
> Can you point to any single decision that Thompson made that cost live and causes suffering? You can’t, but you assume there must have been some,
If denials tripled under his watch, as CEO you don't think he necessarily was involved in that? He clearly approved of profiting off of literal unnecessary deaths.
> because you start with assumption that the victim here is guilty
The most basic of reasoning shows he has some moral guilt, just not legal guilt.
P1 - He was the head decision maker
P2 - Decision was made to actively increase unnecessary deaths for monetary gain
C - He ultimately approved of that decision
You have yet to show that tripling denials of a particular category of claims is even wrong in the first place. Let me repeat: any system will deny some claims, so denied claims are not prima facie evidence of anything wrong.
Decision was made to actively increase unnecessary deaths for monetary gain
Nobody had shown any evidence whatsoever that anything like that happened. Not only are denied claims not automatically wrong, but also changes in denial rate do not even need to correspond to any decision or change in policy, but may instead result from changes of external factors.
He ultimately approved of that decision
What decision? You just assume that there had been some decision, that Bryan Thompson approved, and that it was nefarious. There is as of now zero evidence for this, this is just your speculation. Murdering people based on speculations like that is profoundly evil, and so is excusing it.
Honestly this is a pretty bad faith argument. They are denying at a significantly higher rate than their competitors, their internal policy focused around denying, and enough people are getting screwed over that a murder was committed.
But yeah, sure, assume this is all business as normal and not at all morally wrong to make your argument if you must.
> Nobody had shown any evidence whatsoever that anything like that happened.
Basic. Reasoning.
If claim denials triple during a time when a particular CEO is in place, that CEO would have had to have something to do with that.
> Not only are denied claims not automatically wrong,
They are on this scale and when the denials are bad faith. I can't prove that to you unless their documents get leaked, but that's for legal matters. For moral matters, the evidence supports that the difference from the drastic increase were indeed bad faith denials.
> What decision? You just assume that there had been some decision, that Bryan Thompson approved, and that it was nefarious.
Exactly, because he was CEO.
> There is as of now zero evidence for this, this is just your speculation.
He was CEO.
> Murdering people based on speculations like that is profoundly evil, and so is excusing it.
He was CEO. He oversaw a company going out of their way to deny claims even if you want to play devils advocate and pretend to be ignorant and deny that.
What he did was far more evil than a single murder, and what you are doing in defending the system that caused someone to feel that they had to murder it also more evil, the system that allows for shitty health insurance companies to cause so much pain and suffering. THAT, is evil.