RE the killing vs. not saving, let's maybe put it more precisely - it's decisions that kill people vs. decisions that prevent someone else from saving people. Now in a way, the whole economy indeed runs on the second kind - as long as medical research and medical care aren't money-saturated (i.e. have more of it than know what to do with), all the money that flows somewhere else is preventing lives from being saved. One issue is, we can't just simply redirect all that money to medicine without the world (or at least the country trying) going straight to hell.
As for personal moral responsibility, I think it kind of depends on the "degrees of separation" from the issue. In the Russian stents case, I'd say that what happened is pretty close to mass murder. The separation between patients and the company is just one somewhat fixed legal system, that was about to save lives if it was not for the company. That's like if someone was jumping from a burning building, and last-second you pulled the life net away from where that person was landing. It's not you who killed them, it's the dv/dt...
Most of us, including Netflix, YouTube, et al. are much further separated from life-and-death issues. Like, if I work for a company automating some part of manufacturing in a factory, should I be responsible for a worker who got hit by downsizing? Don't know, I sometimes do feel that way. Should I be responsible for that worker not being able to pay his barberer, who had to start working overtime to compensate, and then didn't have time to go to the gym, and died of a heart condition? There's no way to do that in practice - there's too many variables in between me and that dying person to pin responsibility on one actor, or to even determine the casual chain.
Economy at large is kind of "causality laundering" - too many variables, too much things happening, for a single bad outcome to depend on a single actor if they're not directly connected. But the Russinan thing? Sounds as explicit and direct as one can get without pulling the trigger themselves.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/08/29/reverse-voxsplaining-dr...
RE the killing vs. not saving, let's maybe put it more precisely - it's decisions that kill people vs. decisions that prevent someone else from saving people. Now in a way, the whole economy indeed runs on the second kind - as long as medical research and medical care aren't money-saturated (i.e. have more of it than know what to do with), all the money that flows somewhere else is preventing lives from being saved. One issue is, we can't just simply redirect all that money to medicine without the world (or at least the country trying) going straight to hell.
As for personal moral responsibility, I think it kind of depends on the "degrees of separation" from the issue. In the Russian stents case, I'd say that what happened is pretty close to mass murder. The separation between patients and the company is just one somewhat fixed legal system, that was about to save lives if it was not for the company. That's like if someone was jumping from a burning building, and last-second you pulled the life net away from where that person was landing. It's not you who killed them, it's the dv/dt...
Most of us, including Netflix, YouTube, et al. are much further separated from life-and-death issues. Like, if I work for a company automating some part of manufacturing in a factory, should I be responsible for a worker who got hit by downsizing? Don't know, I sometimes do feel that way. Should I be responsible for that worker not being able to pay his barberer, who had to start working overtime to compensate, and then didn't have time to go to the gym, and died of a heart condition? There's no way to do that in practice - there's too many variables in between me and that dying person to pin responsibility on one actor, or to even determine the casual chain.
Economy at large is kind of "causality laundering" - too many variables, too much things happening, for a single bad outcome to depend on a single actor if they're not directly connected. But the Russinan thing? Sounds as explicit and direct as one can get without pulling the trigger themselves.