UnitedHealth CEO Assassinated

Think he had a fake NJ id but he did stay in a shared room.
Starbucks:

It's my GRAND-son.

Nixon mask < Face/Off < Groucho glasses

Given how advanced facial recognition technology is, shouldn't they already knew who this guy is? There are a few conclusions we can draw from this question. Let me know if I'm missing any.

a) The technology actually sucks.

b) His image isn't a database.

c) His image is in a database, and law enforcement hasn't been able to access to it.

d) His image is in a database, and his identity is known, but it hasn't been released.

Even though there are many plausible theories for each one, they're largely dependent on which one is true.

Its wrong if torturing or paralyzing him would achieve the same results.

Utilitarians will likely say no.

Deontology is gonna lean yes. Though, murder is a loaded term. With all political avenues closed, one could say something like, this is self defense or violence against oppression. Yes, that's a Pandora's box. But otoh 10-15k people a year die for lack of hc. Virtually everyone who understands the issue says this is needless. Do we just agree to be killed? If you're being Kantian, you could formulate maxims that seem favorable or unfavorable.

Virtue ethics will be all over the place. We might say the killer has harmed himself by killing. At the same time, the "victim" chose to harm many people and it is just realistic that someone might harm him. You could say it is his karma.

Religion is also gonna be all over the map, but mostly lean against killing I think. Injustice is an inherent part of the mortal world. We should speak spiritual purity in hopes of something better

Irrelevant, since it’s wrong to pursue justice, renegade style, without first correctly determining which story the pursuit of justice belongs to and contextualizing everything into that story.

Question: What in your view would a genuine atheist be like?

Answer: He'd be like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, and I can't really come up with a better answer than that because it's such a complicated question that that's the right answer...Raskolnikov; he plots the perfect murder. It's so interesting because Dostoevsky—the last thing Dostoevsky ever did was make a straw man out of his opponents. What Dostoevsky did in all of his great novels was make his enemies, let's say, or make each of the positions he was trying to contend with, as powerful and admirable as he possibly could, and since he was an absolutely spectacular genius, he could really do that.

And so Raskolnikov plots a murder, and he murders this horrible woman, who's horrible according to everyone who knows her—who also has enslaved her rather mentally feeble niece—and who does nothing but make people miserable, consciously, all the time. And he does that in order to save his sister from a rather sophisticated form of prostitution; to save himself from starvation, so that he can become a great lawyer and help people. So Dostoevsky sets up the stage: Here's the perfect situation for a murder, and all of the rational choices point in that direction.

And Raskolnikov, who's also sort of tortured because he's sort of hungry and not very well; not thinking very clearly; he undertakes the murder, and he gets away with it. And before he does it, he berates himself in what I would describe as the negative atheistic style. And he basically says, "Look, there is every rational reason to split this woman's skull with an axe. Look at all the good I would do. Look at all the well-being I would enhance." And so he does it. And then all hell breaks loose.

See, Raskolnikov built himself up to the murder, in part, by laying out the rational case but also by saying, "Well, there's no God. There's no metaphysical reason that's stopping me from committing this act, and there's all these reasons that appear perfectly rational, pushing me in that direction. Perhaps I'm nothing but a moral coward for failing to undertake it?" So he does. But what he finds is that he broke and inviolable moral rule; something that spoke to his own soul, so to speak. And the rest of the book, basically, involves his sequential post-traumatic unraveling. And the post-traumatic issue is very interesting because one of the things you do see happening with post-traumatic stress disorder is that it very often occurs in people who watched themselves do something of great malevolence, by their own admission...They've stepped outside the ancient moral code, unwittingly, and conducted themselves in a manner they cannot reconcile themselves to, and they are permanently broken.

So, there are works like that—Crime and Punishment, first and foremost, I would say—that do a lovely job of elucidating in narrative form how these self-evident moral presuppositions are necessarily nested inside this broader narrative metaphorical substrate. And that you use your rationality divorced from that metaphorical substrate at your peril. And I believe that to be the case. I think that's an accurate psychological summation.

Raskolnikov pursued justice, renegade style, within the wrong story and got his reality checked..

Years ago a woman over my way endured years of physical abuse from her husband. One day she waited until he fell asleep and stabbed the pos to death. Technically she killed someone in a premeditated manner. Jury however acquitted her of murder and found that due to the years of abuse she acted in self defence.
So short answer no it's not always wrong.

Otoh in this specific instance it's vigilantism not self defence. You open that door and to quote Dirty Harry, next thing you're executing your neighbour cuz his dog pissed on your lawn .

There's lots wrong with US health care from what I can see and imo serious reforms are needed. But I don't think executing CEO's is the right way to go about it even if the CEO is unethical, assuming this is why he was killed

Deontology isn't going to lean yes at all.

At least not necessarily.

Normal morality is deontological but in the sense of "killing bad people is ok" + "don't kill people for your own gain".

Then there is the addition of "only some people are usually allowed to kill bad people in society"

Why are you surprised that most leftist people are actually inherently terroristical and love the idea of assassinating people they dislike?

That has been their ethos for the whole history of leftism

Sorry but this is bullshit. There's plenty of Breivicks and Dylan Roofs as well. Piazza Gontana bombing wasn't by leftists either.

Or e) the technology is good if the image is high quality, but this image isn't clear enough to generate a match.

I don't remember anyone clamoring for a war with Russia.

I would have thought that a hostel would ask to see ID, and maybe photocopy the ID, if you were paying in cash. But I've never tried to pay for that sort of thing with cash in the United States.

It's been a while but I worked in video surveillance at one point. Don't know how things have changed over the last 10 years or so, but typically video gets pretty 'silo'd' and isn't as easy to access as you might think. I'm sure things have improved but my guess is that still makes it a big challenge. Even 8 years ago many of the big surveillance customers still hadn't transitioned to digital video.

This is probably true. There is the ability to get high-quality images from a distance, but that gets very expensive and very fast.

Americans want it all the ways on health care. We want everything to be covered. We want to be able to see doctors more or less immediately. But we also want health insurance to be much cheaper than it is now.

Obviously. I dislike dealing with (and paying for) health insurance as much as the next person, but I was a little surprised at the depth of the hatred that many people seem to have for their health insurers.

Which we don't know. A vendetta motivated by a denial of coverage is still the most likely motive, but it is far from certain.

Indeed, at present we don't know. It's interesting though that the three words on the casing, deny defend depose, paraphrases a book on insurance companies not paying called delay deny defend. Superficially at least, it's looking more likely as a motive.

For health care especially, the argument it should be significantly cheaper is especially incoherent when you look at where the money is actually going. As the healthcare industry is a giant source of middle class jobs, especially for minorities/women. Next time you go to a hospital/clinic look around. It is mostly women (non-white where I live and probably where a lot of you live too) making between $50k-$200K/yr. We could probably make health care significantly cheaper by streamlining and removing many of these jobs. Is that what you want?

Also, be honest. Have most of you actually had significant problems with your health insurance providers? We have just had an HMO the last 20 years, and really haven't had any major problems (knock on wood).

Most of the expenses and problems with health insurance (and more general health care) are related to elderly end of life care; which is tremendously expensive and resource intensive. And there are a lot of moral and ethical questions that go into the question of improving end of life care.

This was before the Ukraine war started even. After it did it got much much worse obviously.

I agree that health care is a significant source of middle class jobs, but FWIW, this isn't how we tend to think about efficiency in other sectors.

Just the usual annoyances for me. Nothing major.

I am not a health care expert, but this sounds correct to me.

I had a friend who died from brain cancer and she had all sorts of problems with insurance. I don't know the details though.