The only reason some people still treat the CEO as less of a murderer than whoever killed him is the whole “action versus inaction” thing.

When an insurance company causes a death, it does it by not paying money that could have gone toward saving a life.

Breaking the rule of “first do no harm,” but in the Asimov sense. And of course, robots could never actually function by Asimov’s First Law (“do not harm a human or allow harm to a human through inaction”)– because they’ve got limited resources to save people who are in danger of harm, and they’d be stuck in a trolley problem crash forever.

Choosing not to save a life is causing death by inaction. In many cases, we treat this as less of a problem than causing death through action (like with a gun or knife).

But what’s the line between action and inaction? I think part of the reason you’d HAVE to include harm through inaction in a law for robots– even though it wouldn’t work and would crash them– is because something as literal and logical as robots couldn’t parse a definition of the difference between “doing stuff” and “not doing stuff.” We’re always doing some action, even if it’s “standing in place.”

And human definitions sometimes do treat “standing in place” as an action. If parents decide to stand in place indefinitely instead of feeding their child, they’re deemed to have willfully murdered the child through neglect.

It’s a question of responsibility. The parents have the responsibility to care for the child, so that is their default state. Deviation from it is treated as action, even if it’s inaction. For them, with the responsibility to save their kid’s life many times a day, NOT saving that life becomes killing.

An insurance company has taken on the responsibility to save lives by providing money to pay for care. It’s their job. They’re paid for it.

But– like a robot refusing to understand any of the nuance of a command– they focus on the question of “just how far?” Because, after all, their responsibility doesn’t extend to paying for absolutely everything. Not even absolutely everything that could, potentially, save a life.

Because if they did that, their expenses, overall, would exceed their income. And since they’re a corporation, their actual “first law” is to make money.

Arguably, because of investors, their first law is to make more money each year than the previous. Which, obviously, can only go on for so long before it falls apart. And the weakest seams, the places it falls apart first, are the benefits to customers and employees.

So the question of “just how far” gets shifted, more and more, toward “not very damn far.” The service they claim to provide becomes less and less worth it. People keep buying it, but increasingly this is because they’ve been duped into thinking it’ll be worth it, that it’ll save them in the event that they need it to.

Anyone who doesn’t have sympathy for the shooter here, doesn’t know the experience of reaching that event and finding out it’s not gonna save you after all.

Some of the people who’ve never been there, seem to really think that you only get there by your own bad choices. Or at least they talk as if that’s what they believe.

In the worldview they profess (whether or not they earnestly believe it), a patient may die from something an insurance company refused to pay for, but this isn’t the fault of the insurance company– it’s the fault of the patient for being in a situation where failing to receive an insurance payout could cause their death.

In their worldview (again, whether or not they believe it), that misfortune– an illness requiring expensive enough treatment; a financial situation where one could never pay the cost of the treatment without help– is something that people only ever get into by being willfully careless.

And maybe they believe that carelessness should really be punishable by death. Or maybe they just think “carelessness causes death” is an unchangeable law of nature and it’s nobody’s responsibility to try and fix it. I don’t know. The point is, they blame the victim. And unless they themselves, or someone they really respect, gets into that same predicament, they won’t admit that such a person is worth saving.

And even sometimes if they themselves do experience it– sometimes they still go on thinking their usual worldview still holds for everyone else, and their case is different, special, an Exception. Or that it’s a new sort of thing that happens Now, but didn’t in The World They Grew Up in, no matter who else claims it did. “This never happened to ME before, so therefore all the factors that contributed to it are brand new things, and are entirely the fault of (whichever present-day politicians I hate most.)”

But… this is getting harder and harder to believe, I think.

And “people who have never been victims of this sort of shit” are a smaller and smaller privileged group.

Because the problem IS getting worse, and IS perpetuated by certain people– although of course not everyone blames the individuals most responsible– and of course it’s a systemic issue, just as much as anything individual.

I don’t know if we’re united ENOUGH against the problem to get anything good done.

But at least I am pretty impressed at how united we are, across political divides even, in recognizing that it IS a problem.

(And “United” is a really, really fitting word here. One more case of “if this was fiction, the symbolism would be too heavyhanded.”)