r/MurderedByWords yeah, i'm that guy with 12 upvotes Dec 09 '24

#2 Murder of Week 68,000 Americans

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u/OdinsGhost Dec 09 '24

Maybe it says a lot about me and my own personal ethics, and possibly not in a good way, but I see no moral difference between an insurance company using bureaucracy to intentionally withhold payment for treatment when they know that the most probable and foreseeable result of their refusal is that the patient dies and “being gunned down on the street”.

To me, both are murder. But only one of them rises to the level of “serial killer” and, surprise, it’s not the one the media wants us mad about.

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u/Lonely-Bandicoot-746 Dec 09 '24

You are a utilitarian and would likely succeed at the trolley problem. 

In unrelated news, entire vast spaces of your moral compass are likely fucked if you hold to it consistently.

2

u/OdinsGhost Dec 09 '24

Ah yes, my moral compass must be “fucked” because I do not see “it’s just business“ as a defense for decisions made with enough depraved indifference that it foreseeably leads to the deaths of others. I mush be fucked because I believe that the policy makers and business leaders making such decisions are every bit as guilty of murder as someone pulling a trigger.

And you have a backwards, by the way. Utilitarianism would be the way that people are justifying the decisions of UH that lead to the death and misery they participate in as a “necessary evil” and not murder/manslaughter via “depraved indifference”. Which, in many jurisdictions including New York, it is. In fact, deprived indifference that leads to someone’s death is a second degree murder charge in New York.