Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / “The Case for Assassinating CEOs” with Ethicist Tim Dean

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“The Case for Assassinating CEOs” with Ethicist Tim Dean · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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Okay, humans welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas and few ideas are more dangerous
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than the notion that a targeted assassination or terrorism, public executions and personal
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retribution can be permissible in a peaceful society if they achieve greater ends.
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This is something that seems to have been baked into so many people's responses to the
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assassination on December 4th of the CEO of United Healthcare, one of the biggest private
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health insurers in the United States, brazenly on the streets of New York City.
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The CEO's wife calls it a senseless killing, but senseless isn't exactly right, not if you
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pay attention to the way that people are reacting, especially on social media.
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There was a lot of consternation and gloating at the same time, a lot of a sense that this
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is a moment when Americans have to reckon with the moral seriousness of what the private
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health insurance industry is up to, specifically CEOs like Brian Thompson, who had taken such
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an aggressive approach towards maximizing profits and denying claims, deploying even things
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like artificial intelligence to identify the most lucrative ways to deny coverage to their
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customers.
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All of the chatter around this had always been qualified with a line like, or almost
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always, assassinations of course are terrible and murder is never justified, but, and that
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word but has been banging around in my noggin and doing an enormous amount of work.
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Why do we feel the need to reflexively invoke the murder is never justified, claim?
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If we're then going on to say that the things that this victim did were beyond the pale,
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I had initially also ruled out any consideration of the question about whether or not murder
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could ever be justified.
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It sounds embarrassing even to broach this subject because it's so obvious the kind of blowback
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and misinterpretation that can come from it.
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So let me say right now, murder is never justified in my opinion, but you have to sort of
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also wrestle with why.
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You have to sort of also wrestle with the points that are being made in things like the
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Unabombers manifesto by Ted Kaczynski that the alleged suspect of these shootings had
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read apparently and admired.
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Why is it that a person could preside over an organization that unleashes calamitous
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harm against individuals and be so morally blameless that any retribution is primafaceae
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unjustified?
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So I had been thinking, yeah, of course, murder is bad.
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Of course, these people are all being silly online.
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And then I read some stats about what this CEO had done to United Healthcare.
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The company's share price when he took over in April of 2021 was $370.
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He's taken it up to $6.30 from $370, not quite doubling, but pretty good.
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They made $16.4 billion in profit last year and he was paid $2.10.2 million, 10.2 million
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rather.
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There have been numerous reports by journalistic outlets like pro-publica on the ridiculous
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trouble that the company has gone through so that it can deny claims like one to a chronically
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ill man who had all sorts of very coverable medical problems.
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There's been a Senate committee into United Healthcare saying that they systematically deny
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solid claims from Medicare Advantage patients.
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These are older Americans to pad their margins and that they do so with the help of artificial
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intelligence.
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There was a lawsuit last year against United Healthcare brought by a chronically ill college
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student who says he was saddled with $800,000 in medical bills when his drugs that were
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prescribed by his doctor were denied.
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United Healthcare is currently fighting a class action lawsuit on the basis of the claim
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that it uses artificial intelligence to end treatments too early.
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Critics of the system and the company in particular say that their profits come in part due to
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suffering by ordinary Americans.
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They point out that United Healthcare was rated the worst insurer for denying claims.
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They turn down 32% of all claims.
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So you get insurance.
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You get health insurance with United Healthcare.
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There's a one in three chance your claim will be denied.
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That's twice the industry average of 16%.
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Like all American insurers, they undergo this ridiculous process of what's called prior
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authorization, which doesn't exist in most other developed countries where patients and
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doctors have to get permission from an insurer before a medical procedure takes place.
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So how bad would an executive have to be for it to be okay to step outside the institutions
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of democracy and try to make him pay in some way, even if it were far, far short of assassination.
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And how do we enact social change in the context of murder always being wrong?
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If you haven't been online and you haven't been following the reaction to this or you're
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outside the United States and this is all kind of news to you, I'll just put some flesh
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on the bones of what the reaction has been, a commemorative Facebook post by the United
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Health Group, the parent company of United Healthcare, saying, you know, I helped thoughts
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and prayers go out to Brian Thompson, his family, racked up more than 77,000 laughing emojis.
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Other social media users posted counter condolence messages like my empathy is out of network
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or I'm sorry, prior authorization is required for thoughts and prayers.
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The bullet casings from the bullets that apparently took his life were inscribed with permanent
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marker that said, depose, deny and delay, that seems to be a reference to a common anti-private
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health insurance slogan, delay, deny, defend, which is basically a three word summary of
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the tactics that insurers use to avoid paying out clients in the United States, delay dealing
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with a claim, deny, the payment and defend the decision in court.
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Another person who responded to the shooting was a Columbia University professor, Anthony
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Zankas, who posted on Twitter and this post has been liked more than 100,000 times.
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Today we mourn the death of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, gun down, dot, dot, dot,
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wait, I'm sorry.
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Today we mourn the deaths of the 68,000 Americans who needlessly die each year so that insurance
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company execs like Brian Thompson can become multimillionaires.
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Some of the backdrop to this is that in the 1990s, the consulting firm McKinsey and company
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developed new strategies for how private health insurance in the United States could become
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more profitable and how they could more effectively reduce their costs.
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Computer systems were designed to generate low ball offers for clients who were basically
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told to either take it or take them to court.
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In 2005, the state of Louisiana took on McKinsey, the consulting company and the insurers
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who it worked with, one of whom was United Healthcare, arguing in their court case and I'll
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quote from the court, uh, lodgement here from the state of Louisiana, saying that McKinsey
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quote, engineer to strategy that undervalued insurance claims, allowing insurance companies
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and their shareholders to reap the profits.
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Initially McKinsey advise insurers to stop what's called premium leakage by undervaluing
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claims using the tactics of denied, denied delay and defend.
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As a result, many insurers began hiring McKinsey.
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The claim is that United Health staff were pressured to follow an artificial intelligence
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algorithms calculations on when to cut off rehabilitation care for elderly patients.
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Which brings us, I suppose, to the alleged suspect in this case.
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The New York Times reports that after sifting through some of his online activity, there
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was a review that he made, a positive reflection or reposting of a post about Ted Kaczynski's
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unabomber manifesto on which an individual had written, which was subsequently reviewed
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favorably by the suspect.
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We live in a capitalist society.
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I've found that the medical industry responds to, though, to these key words far more
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urgently than you're describing unbearable pain and how it's impacting your quality
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of life.
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These words meaning that you should tell your doctor if you have a, uh, an illness that
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is preventing you from working rather than causing your unbearable pain.
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Because if you say you're prevented from working, they're more likely to treat you.
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And the insurer is supposedly more likely to cover you.
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Not saying that's true.
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Not saying that this is what the suspect was talking about favorably online.
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In that passage online, the suspect quoted what he described as, quote, interesting remarks
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from someone who had written about how companies have zero qualms about burning down the
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planet for a buck.
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So why should we have any qualms about burning them down to survive?
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The passage went on, quote, peaceful protest is outright ignored.
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Economic protest isn't possible in the current system.
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So how long until we recognize that violence against those who lead us to such destruction
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is justified as self-defense.
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If you know me and you know this show, you know that nothing, uh, nothing tempts me more
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than trying to broach an impossible subject.
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So rather than just taking it as a given that murder is wrong, I want to understand why
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it's wrong and under what circumstances it would not be wrong so that we can properly
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appreciate some of the ideas that are fueling the far right and potentially contributing
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to a breakdown of law and order.
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Tim Dean is the senior philosopher at the ethics center, which is a nonprofit that fosters
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moral conversations about everyday life.
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He has a PhD in philosophy, he has an expertise in the evolution of morality.
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He runs philosophy and ethics workshops for businesses.
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He's a public philosopher and science writer whose first book is called How We Became Human,
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which is about how our evolved moral minds are out of step with modern world.
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Tim Dean is the perfect person to wrestle with these ideas with Tim Dean.
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Thanks for being here.
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Thanks Josh.
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Good to be chatting to you.
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Is it ever justified to kill someone for a greater good?
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Hmm.
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Yeah, we go straight in.
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Yeah, look, I mean, I should preface this by saying, and this will be just like a footnote
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that'll go under everything that I say, which is that naturally philosophers have thought
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a lot about this question and they disagree.
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But there are different ways that we can unpack what it means because I think what's useful
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about the philosophical approach is we don't just take a gut reaction or a sense of
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outrage or justice to be sufficient.
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We try to find some good reasons.
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And there have been some who've said, yeah, there are some good reasons to kill in situations
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where there are bigger issues at stake where not killing would become a problem.
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So one way that some philosophers have talked about this is what kind of conditions should
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we have in order to justify violence or killing somebody.
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And there's a few that come up quite a lot.
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And I think a lot of philosophers would probably agree that this is some good questions to
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be asking ourselves before we get into this.
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And I mean, also just to put pause there, questions we should be asking ourselves, which
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kind of separates this decision-making process from a reflexive or a defensive mechanism
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or a gut outrage mechanism.
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Like these are the reasons and these aren't necessarily in a, in a, in a, hit of the moment
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situation, something we might be able to think through, but can we justify even after
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the fact?
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So here, here, just here a few, like in order to cause any harm to somebody else where
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murder or killing is the, the ultimate harm, we've got to have just cause.
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We've got to have a good reason to do it.
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And just cause is usually not going to be because I feel like it or because it benefits me
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in some way.
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There's got to be some kind of moral imperative that we can call on.
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So maybe this person, we might find a moral reason to say they deserve it.
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We can try to unpack what that means at some point.
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We could say that it, the cause is because if I don't do it, something even worse is
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going to happen.
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Like we can imagine a lot of situations and philosophers had or these thought experiments.
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But if this person has their finger on a trigger for a bomb that is going to imminently kill
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a thousand people and I can shoot them, then I shoot them.
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Another just, just cause might be survival, self-defense, to say that, you know, I have
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a right to protect myself.
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But it's not just having a just cause.
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We've got to then say, okay, let's say I've got just cause, let's say I've cleared
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that threshold.
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And I mean, there's a lot we could try to unpack there as well, but let's say we clear
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that threshold, then I've also got to satisfy another threshold of proportionality.
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Like would punching someone in the face, which is still causing them harm, is that going
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to be sufficient to satisfy the ends?
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Is that going to prevent the greater harm?
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Is that going to help my survival, whatever it is?
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And I, because I don't want to be disproportional, I don't want to blow the whole building up
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just to save another few lives on the outside.
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And then there's another threshold that we want to get to as well, which is necessity.
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Is this action of violence necessary?
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So let's say if there's somebody who we think is contributing to a systemic harm, like,
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you know, potentially affecting thousands of people, is a violent act necessary or is
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another act going to be just as effective in terms of preventing the harm that is motivating
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me in the first place.
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So right there, we've got three clauses that we can look to, three thresholds, just cause
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proportionality and necessity.
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And of course, even if you accept them, you can disagree about what goes on underneath
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each one of those.
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But that's a starting point.
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And I'm not saying that starting point discussed a lot when it comes to this particular murder
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in terms of that kind of language.
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Yeah, there's another, and this is probably part of, well, I don't know, you tell me where
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this falls.
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The reason I wanted to talk about this and the reason why I started wondering about it
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was because I heard another podcaster saying, look, it's obviously the case that the world
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will be worse if people do this sort of thing.
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Like, this is a person who was generally sympathetic towards the left wing criticism
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of people like this CEO, saying like, yeah, no matter how bad what he did is, it's obviously
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a worse world if we live in a world in which CEOs are being assassinated.
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And that was where I caught myself and thought, well, hang on, are we sure, like just this
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place I was advocate for a moment, if you lived in a corrupt corporate system where big
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insurance companies were in cahoots with the government to screw the little guy, hypothetically,
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would it be a worse world if those people felt slightly less impunity, let's just take
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the AI example.
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Right?
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Let's suppose that there's a CEO who has deployed an AI that will reliably cause misery
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and death for 10% of their customers but raise the company's profits and that he is able
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to collude with governments to pull this off and is shameless about it.
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Is it necessarily a worse world if those CEOs have to be slightly less shameless about
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doing such things because they have a higher degree of concern for their personal safety
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and have to spend more on personal security?
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Yeah, is it going to be a better world?
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And is that even the right question to ask?
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I mean, I was just responding to that.
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Obviously, that's a consequentialist question, right?
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And we can talk about the difference between, you know, this guy has a right to continue
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living.
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I mean, you know, like if you want to be Cartier about it, like in fact, shall we just
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put a, shall we just explain sort of these two broad ways of thinking about morality
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now?
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Yeah, sure.
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Like two of the big tools in the ethical toolkit that have been developed by thinkers for,
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you know, centuries, broadly fall into the kind of means view and the ends view.
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What justifies our action?
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Is it the means that we take to get to that action, which you could call the Kantian view
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or I'm helpfully jargonistically the deontological view, which says that what makes something the
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right thing to do is that it adheres to a principle or a duty or a rule.
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And so, you know, we have a rule.
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Don't lie to people, you know, don't cheat them, don't kill them, don't murder them.
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How do you know you're doing the right thing?
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You're following those kinds of rules.
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But we can also think of lots of examples where lying to someone might produce a beneficial
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outcome.
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So then we start to think about the ends.
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And that's the consequentialist view.
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I love it.
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Philosophers actually named it for what it is.
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It talks about the consequences and the outcomes.
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And utilitarianism is probably the most famous version of that because when you talk about
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the outcome, you say, I'm going to do something, what impact is it going to have upon the
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world?
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Is that good or bad?
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We need to decide, well, what impact matters?
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Some people talk about pleasure, some people talk about happiness, some people talk about
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preventing suffering, utilitarians bundle a whole bunch of different things into this
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one term called utility.
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And so they're like, okay, we can measure the utility of the world, well, okay, if we
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can measure the utility of the world to say, I can do something and it's going to increase
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a bit of freedom and happiness and reduce suffering, that overall increases the utility.
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That's what I should do.
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But again, we can think of examples where I could increase the utility of the world by
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violating a lot of moral rules, like, you know, even go back to like, I don't know,
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Plato and his noble lie to say, you know what, if you just lie to your entire public and
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give them some false narrative that binds them together and makes them a coherent community
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and they're all lovely and they're cooperative, you know, that could kind of make a better
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world.
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But you're also just like fabricating an entire mythology that is bullshit, that you're
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trying to get everyone to buy into.
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And a lot of people would be uncomfortable about that.
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So they're the two kind of broad schools of thought.
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What's more important, the means or the ends?
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And we should probably, I guess, just, you know, admit that this conversation is largely
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going to take place in a consequentialist frame because if you are a deontologist, there
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is no starting place for this conversation really because a murder took place and murder
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is against the rules and therefore it's against the rules and come to me, deontology becomes
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almost a circular, a total logical thing.
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Like by definition, murder is bad.
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Therefore, there's no point in even asking about it.
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But that doesn't get us very far in terms of people's intuitions.
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And it's not, you're not going to dissuade the Ted Kaczynski's of the world or, you
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know, whoever shot this CEO by saying murder is wrong because they're going to go, well,
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then why does he get to lead?
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Why does this CEO get to cause even if indirectly the deaths of lots of people?
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But it's happening inside of a structure of institutions that permit it.
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I mean, it almost reminds me to him a little bit of the distinction we make between terrorism
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and war.
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You know, we get to declare war on Iraq and go in and kill a million people and Dick
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Cheney can live happily ever after.
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But if one of those Iraqis tries to resist the occupation by blowing up a, you know,
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a, a Humvee, that's terrorism.
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Or, you know, look at Israel and Gaza or something, they can, they can kill with impunity,
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you know, or lead to the deaths of an unacceptable number of Palestinian babies.
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And that gets coded as warfare.
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I mean, many people do object to this, but this is precisely the point that they're making.
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Why does that get coded as warfare as legitimate because it's warfare?
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But retaliatory attack that was much smaller, but targeted civilians would not like the,
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the fact that the war reliably leads to the death of civilians should count for at least
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almost as much as the intentional targeting of civilians and, and by that same logic,
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the fact that a healthcare company's policies to drive up at stock price are reliably going
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to emiserate people should count for something in the moral calculus alongside extrajudicial
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killings.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, look, and there's a lot, there's a lot there to want back.
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So I think when we think about the difference between justified violence and unjustified
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violence, we would like to think that there are organizations, there are boundaries, there
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are perhaps institutions that have brought on board in the case of war, for example, just
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war theory, which talks about just cause proportionality and necessity, and that there is a kind
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of a check and a balance on that so that we're not relying upon an individual to unilaterally
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make a decision about these things, but there's a system with an ability to correct it and
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all that kind of stuff.
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We want to think that's the case, but we know that that's not always the case.
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And then you could argue that there are some terrorist organizations as well that have
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systems and principles and rules and say, here's what we're going to do and here's
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what we're not going to do.
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So there is an element of, it's not entirely arbitrary, but there's an element of kind
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of partisanship in terms of the narrative that we present towards particular types of violence
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based upon the side that we're on and the side that we are we're rooting for.
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And so, but putting that aside, I also, there's an interesting distinction as well when it
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comes to intention, because, and philosophers draw this distinction as well, and it's
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often, again, the kind of jargon is the doctrine of double effect.
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It's the idea that it is wrong to intentionally harm somebody for an unjustified end.
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It may even be wrong to intentionally harm somebody for a justified end.
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So if, for example, a military says there's a few terrorists tidying in a hospital and
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we are going to intentionally destroy this hospital, knowing that there are innocent
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and civilian people in there.
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And we know as a byproduct of that, we're going to prevent, you know, a resource hub or
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something for the terrorists.
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We would say the intention to attack a hospital and intention to attack innocent people
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is wrong.
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But if you flip it around and you say, no, our intention is to prevent something really
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bad from happening or to punish a really, you know, guilty individual.
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And we know that by doing that, there's going to be a side effect that we're going to
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be harming some other people.
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So there's going to be collateral damage.
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But we're not intending to hurt anybody who's innocent.
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It's a side effect of our action.
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It becomes psychologically and in some philosophers think it's more justifiable to do that action
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if it's going to, as a side effect, hurt other people.
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So here, for example, let's draw a distinction between drawing a gun on a healthcare CEO
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with the intention to kill.
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And through the killing, the side effect is going to be one might hope or the killer might
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be hoping to change the system and prevent a lot of other harm compared to the CEO, who
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is intention is to raise profits or to respond to, you know, commercial pressures or to
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whatever that kind of things or to provide a certain level of healthcare and unintentionally,
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but knowingly, this is going to harm a lot of people.
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There can also just be a difference between, between those two.
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I mean, take it or leave it, right?
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Some people will say that's not, not enough.
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But it's really problematic because there are going to be situations where we want to
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permit doing something that is going to unintentionally harm other people and say that's the right
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thing to do.
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And we are not willing to permit an intentional harm with the side of the effect.
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And look, and our intuition guides us towards that difference.
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I think we clearly believe that, I mean, there's a reason why we have murder versus manslaughter,
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right?
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Or, you know, why intention matters and the men's rarer of the criminal matters in law.
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I would just note that the critique of that would be that that's a distinction that
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favors the powerful always because when you're powerful, you get to deploy things in such
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a way that you can cause untold, you can wreak unhold, untold havoc.
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Your levers are just bigger.
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And therefore you can press a button in Washington, DC and a chemical factory, you know, can
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explode on the other side of the world, which may or may not have been producing chemical
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weapons.
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And you reliably know that hundreds of civilians are going to be killed in that.
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But it wasn't your intent.
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On the other hand, the powerless person who straps on a backpack bomb and blows up a bus
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whilst morally reprehensible has no other tools of power.
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Like that is the only card they're holding in their hand.
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So the so the intent thing, I can imagine the powerless looking at that and going, yeah,
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nice story, bro.
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Yeah, look, and power, let's go there, right?
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Because power, I think, is often neglected in these conversations around ethics.
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There's a temptation and I think a lot of ethics has fallen to this as well.
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There's a temptation to say, look, if we can just find the right reasons, explain them
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to people and have people accept, yeah, these reasons, these values, these principles
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of what we should be following, then people will just do the right thing.
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But power always gets in the way.
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Power not only changes what we're capable of doing and what we are prevented from doing.
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But it also gives a kind of a license to those who set the narrative around what is good
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and bad, to be able to inhibit other people to be able to do what is in their personal ethical
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stance.
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And this is something that's made me really uncomfortable around the whole Thompson murder
26:35
is, I mean, I'm in favor of law and order in principle when law and order is protecting
26:44
kind of civil society where we are able to live without the threat of unilateral violence
26:50
against people who others might find morally repugnant because someone's going to find
26:55
me morally repugnant.
26:56
And I don't particularly want them to have the ability to just, you know, gun me down.
27:00
So this is the bargain that we have in civil society is that we're going to try to resolve
27:04
our differences through means other than violence.
27:07
And so we delegate violence to, you know, the institutions with checks and balances to
27:11
be able to do that, you know, but in the situation like this, I felt uncomfortable by appealing
27:18
to the law and order response to say, you know, this is wrong and we should catch the killer
27:25
and punish them appropriately.
27:28
If the law and order response is the thing that is now just protecting a corrupt system,
27:33
is protecting a system that not only, because there's a double layer of corruption, there's
27:37
not only about a system that causes or doesn't prevent harm, it's a system that doesn't
27:43
allow itself to be changed.
27:44
And this is a key part of this civil bargain to say, I'm going to give up my right to
27:48
shoot other people.
27:50
If they give up their right to shoot mine, if we've got some organization that's going
27:53
to watch over us and use force to prevent things bad, you know, from happening.
27:59
But if that system itself is open for me to be able to criticize it, change it, make
28:03
sure that it's working is intended and if it's not working is intended, I need to have
28:07
civil means to be able to rectify that.
28:10
And in the absence of those civil means to make the system work, to make it just, then
28:18
I'm worried that going to the standard of thing of saying, yeah, law and order is the right
28:22
response here is still failing because the civil bargain has been, they've already failed
28:30
on the civil side, on the institutional side.
28:32
So who am I actually supporting here?
28:34
Am I just now entrenching the harm that's caused by corrupt organization?
28:39
Yeah.
28:40
And I mean, you know, even though a lot of the criticisms of the healthcare industry in
28:44
the wake of the assassination have come from the left, what you're pointing to is really
28:49
resonant with the revolution that's happened on the right from a small sea conservatism
28:54
of the, you know, the George H. W. Bush era, I guess, or the Reagan era institutionalists
29:01
elite elites really to the kind of far right, both the far right in Europe and also the
29:07
make America great again, kind of Trump movement is a really counter institutional.
29:12
I mean, look, appointing, you know, someone who hates the FBI to run the FBI, for example,
29:16
is, you know, one of Trump's moves now.
29:20
It's a counter institutional anti elite movement that is obviously growing out of a sense, especially
29:25
in America, but sort of everywhere, that actually the, the tools that we would normally use
29:31
to enact our will on those systems and make them democratically responsive and reactive
29:36
are broken.
29:37
We're pulling levers and nothing's happening like there's just a cabal of people, of rich
29:42
people and powerful people who are making decisions for us.
29:45
And at that point, that's when I think the, the plausibility or the credibility of ideas
29:52
like the ones that were sort of tiptoeing around become more, you know, loom larger for
29:57
people, become more viable for people and that opens the door to violence.
30:02
I mean, you can imagine a scenario, you can think of a society like Chile under Pinochet
30:07
or some other right wing authoritarian that leans on the importance of upholding institutions
30:13
and law and order as a way to screw everybody over.
30:17
You can imagine a hypothetical in which like let's just play with the dials a little bit
30:22
Tim on the actual scenario here to see where we get to a point at which public harm or retaliation
30:30
could be morally permissible.
30:33
Like let's suppose that insurance companies in America were in cooots with doctors at hospitals
30:40
to provide them with kickbacks to terminate early expensive patients' lives who are in
30:45
the hospital.
30:46
We all, we know the patients never going to leave.
30:48
They've probably got another eight months lying on life support.
30:52
Let's just make that three months or two weeks and you get a holiday in the Bahamas courtesy
30:58
of the health care, the health insurer, right?
31:02
The families of those victims be permitted to step out of the democratic institutional
31:09
system and say it's not good enough for you to expect me to write letters to my congressional
31:16
representative or my senator about this.
31:19
I want to what send threatening letters about the CEO's children to him.
31:27
We contaminate the fuel supply of his private jet so that it encounters problems in the
31:33
air and has to make an emergency landing somewhere, inconvenience him in some other way, replace
31:39
his organic meals with slightly poisoned meals that will decrease his life expectancy
31:46
by a few months or years.
31:49
Like is all of that out of bounds because we all have to play by the rules?
31:53
Yeah, look, let's play with that, right?
31:55
Well, let's say the letter writing campaigns have come to naught, let's say that I keep
32:02
voting and nothing ever changes.
32:04
Let's say that I'm trying to do the right thing and I'm trying to protect even like, protect
32:11
the life of a loved one and I'm sure there are many people in the United States who felt
32:15
exactly that feeling of saying I'm outraged because I loved one, I is suffering and potentially
32:21
dying because of this.
32:23
What can we do?
32:24
Let's say on those three clauses that I had before, we've got just clause, we've got proportionality
32:29
and we've got necessity, we've got just cause to do something.
32:34
And so what do we do?
32:35
Let's look at the proportionality and this is the question it's going to is like, where
32:38
do we draw that threshold?
32:39
And I've got to say there isn't, there is a really useful distinction between violence
32:45
and force.
32:47
There was a, I was reading a paper where in the, in the US in 1969, there was a student
32:54
sit-in that were occupying an administration building and a bunch of high-level university
32:59
people, the deans were, were trapped within and the deans were escorted outside by security
33:04
and someone on the side of the deans yelled out, you're using violence against these university
33:09
people.
33:10
And someone in one of the student predators was like, no, we're not.
33:12
We're using force.
33:15
Force is a form of coercion.
33:17
We are changing someone's behavior in a way that they wouldn't automatically behave that
33:24
way.
33:25
We're pushing them to behave in a different way.
33:26
Man, if they think we're dragging people out physically is not violence, they should
33:29
get a load of the social justice warriors on campus these days who say that words of
33:33
violence.
33:34
Well, so this is where in the 1960s, the discourse and the change in the usage of the word
33:40
violence hadn't expanded.
33:42
And so there was a push to change the nature of violence, to not just talk about an individual
33:49
actor, but to talk about systems, take it all leave it.
33:52
I'm not sure that's a useful change of language.
33:55
Right.
33:56
And you'll also often hear, far leftists, to deny that property damage is violence.
34:01
I think in common parlance, we would think about a brick through the window of a shop
34:05
as being violent, but you'll often hear communist people who still use the label of
34:11
communist saying that's not, you know, attacking property is not violence, attacking humans
34:15
is violence.
34:16
Yeah.
34:17
And it becomes a matter of semantics of like, where do we draw the line around violence?
34:20
I mean, if you just define violence as being like an aggressive sharp act to cause damage
34:26
and harm, I mean, you know, you could, you could do that more widely or you could, you
34:29
could shrink it down.
34:30
But force, I think, is useful because force, violence is a form of force because you're,
34:34
you know, you're co-using someone to change in the behavior, maybe ending their behavior
34:38
and ending their life in a way that they wouldn't do automatically.
34:42
And so there are lots of ways that we can force people to change their behavior, to protect
34:48
people we love or to, to, to fix the systemic injustices or whatever that is.
34:55
And I think you could justify it.
34:57
You could set that bar to say, I'm going to step in and do something to force someone
35:02
to stop harming a family member, I'm going to, you know, you could even say, I'm going
35:07
to pick it their place of work so they're not even able to function effectively so they
35:11
can't do the act to, to be able to prevent it.
35:14
I'm going to let down their ties so they can't get to the place they would need to get
35:18
to to cause the harm that they, you know, I think all of those kinds of step levels where
35:22
you're saying, I'm not exercising more force because you get that other clause which is
35:26
necessity.
35:27
I'm doing just what is necessary and I'm still exerting force and still making them
35:31
do something they don't want to do.
35:32
I'm still harming them in some way, but it's not necessarily stepping up to, to violence
35:38
because I mean, we, when you step to violence outside of the state, when individuals get
35:46
their hands dirty by acting on violence, this is, I think this has been discussed, but
35:51
I'll say it again.
35:53
The danger is you're taking that decision to enact violence out of a hands of an institution
35:58
ostensibly with checks and balances.
36:00
May or may not be using them, but ostensibly there's some process to decide whether violence
36:05
is warranted and putting in the hands of an individual and the problem of putting in
36:08
a hands of an individual, particularly in the increasingly fragmented and tessellated
36:13
and diverse moral and social world that we live in today, is the moral agent can be willing
36:20
to sacrifice anything or to kill anybody in order to see their, their will done.
36:25
And that's too much power to be putting in the hands of people who don't have the checks
36:28
and balances around them.
36:30
So, so setting, we don't, we don't want that bar to be set so low that violence goes into
36:35
that breakdown of the civil bargain to say, now it's up to me to defend myself.
36:40
I mean, this is why I think, yes, I finished that.
36:43
Well, just, just that the quick little thought is, this is why I think this story is so
36:46
interesting.
36:47
It's such an American story.
36:49
It's about this systemic failure of healthcare systems, such an American thing in the
36:53
modern world.
36:55
It's about the failure of politics to correct this system, which is also an American thing.
36:59
I mean, Americans hate Congress and yet it's just, they, they feel unable to change it.
37:05
It's also a very American story to take things into your own hands.
37:08
I immediately thought about that Michael Douglas film falling down from the, from the 90s,
37:14
where this guy is just trying to get home to see his daughter and everyone, the system
37:18
keeps getting in his way and he keeps trying to do the right thing and he eventually gets
37:21
more and more violent as he's trying to do it.
37:24
And we don't, we, we see him as an anti hero, but he's still, there's still a hero there,
37:27
right?
37:28
It starts with the burger at the, at a burger joint, which doesn't look like the beautiful
37:32
picture of the burger on the sign and he gets this sloppy thing and starts beating the
37:37
place upright.
37:38
The great line in that movie is his final line when Robert DuVille, who plays the cop,
37:43
has him in a showdown and finally has him cornered at Michael Douglas looks at him and goes,
37:48
I'm the bad guy.
37:49
Yeah, right.
37:52
And this is what I don't, I don't want to, I don't want people to be in that situation,
37:56
right?
37:57
But if they're in that situation and I'm the one they're pointing the gun at, I don't
38:00
want them thinking, am I the bad guy after they've shot me?
38:03
Right.
38:04
So, so that's, that's where we want to set the, the bar high.
38:07
But yeah, what can we, what can we be, what can be permissible?
38:10
I think exerting force and there, there's a lot of literature on civil disobedience as
38:15
a form of coercive, you know, forcing an institution to change or that kind of thing.
38:22
But the difference, and this is a really key difference, maybe we could talk about this
38:25
a bit more as well, is unilateral action, only by definition requires one person to execute
38:31
that action, whereas civil disobedience is a collective action and you need a lot of
38:35
people to move at the same time to make something happen.
38:39
And that's much, much harder to do, I would say, I've said before, I actually think we've
38:43
got solutions to most of the world's problems.
38:45
We know, actually, I think a lot of Americans know how to fix the healthcare system, what
38:49
they can't do is solve the problem of how to get enough people moving at the same time
38:54
in order to get the, overcome the inertia to make that happen.
38:58
And so, I think today in today's world, another thing that's contributing to the breakdown
39:02
and encouraging interlateral action is the fragmented nature and the polarized nature of, of society
39:08
means that it's harder to get a big enough group of people to move at once to actually
39:11
have enough force to overcome the inertia to change things.
39:15
Let's just pause there on unilateral action then, because the whole argument of the terrorist
39:21
or the assassin in these kinds of situations when we're talking about a crusader type mentality
39:26
and not just a nihilist, but someone who's trying to presumably achieve something, their
39:31
revolutionaries, right?
39:33
And their argument would be that the institutions aren't like, it would sound to them like what
39:38
you're saying is that no revolution is ever justified, right?
39:42
Like that no attempt to step outside of the institutions is ever justified unless it
39:48
is peaceful.
39:49
But like, was the first interfada in Gaza, you know, where people rose up on mass, you
39:57
know, and tried to push back against their occupation, justified, like, was the American
40:03
revolution or the French revolution justified these were, this was people taking into
40:09
their own hands a commitment to do, to commit violence in the interests of overthrowing
40:14
an unjust system and implementing something better.
40:16
Yeah, and let me stress that while I would always be in favor of peaceful or non-violent
40:24
resistance where that can work, there will be certainly places where it won't work, where
40:31
the system is corrupt, the system is not only corrupt and unjust and harmful, but it
40:37
does not allow itself to be corrected.
40:40
And even non-violent action is not going to do it.
40:42
So yes, violent violence can be justified, collective violence can be justified.
40:46
But when you look at the French revolution, you look at the, you know, the American revolution,
40:51
you usually have a group of thinkers agonizing over what we should be doing and how we should
40:58
be doing it.
40:59
And trying to temper the violent outburst, the outrage motivated violence that could easily
41:08
take over a mob, to try to direct it towards constructive ends and we can see how fragile
41:14
that is and how difficult that is, you look at the repercussions of the French revolution.
41:20
So yeah, I mean, violent revolution is can be necessary when the system absolutely refuses
41:27
to allow itself to be, to be changed.
41:30
Right.
41:31
But we know we're near that in the United States.
41:33
And I mean, the other thing, less to be misunderstood, I'm arguing for the justness
41:39
of this particular killing, which I'm not.
41:43
The other thing that strikes me as useful in trying to wrestle through this is the recognition
41:49
of the basic immorality, I think, of using another person as a tool to achieve your, your
41:59
desired ends.
42:00
Right.
42:01
I mean, what's, what's strangely awful about the kind of terrorist or assassins mindset,
42:08
this crusader mindset is that it takes an individual human being and it makes them an instrument
42:15
essentially.
42:16
Which is precisely what life, yeah.
42:18
And it makes them an instrument for a higher and on what basis do you have the right to
42:24
enroll that person into your vision of an America that has a more just health care system?
42:31
Yeah.
42:32
Like, I understand that you think that he's complicit.
42:35
But what's your standing for, you know, enlisting his family in the mission of having to spend
42:41
the rest of their lives grieving for their husband and father?
42:45
Like that.
42:46
It's, I don't know, help me, help me through the, the, the ethics of this because it reminds
42:51
me and maybe this is an unfair comparison to make for towards Australian governments.
42:58
But the thing that has always stuck in my crawl about the Australian attitude towards
43:03
policing our borders is that we essentially make examples of people who tried to come
43:08
here illegally on boats in order to deter other people and a plausible case can be made
43:14
and is made by successive Australian governments that people's lives are saved on net by the existence
43:22
of a very brutal Australian immigration regime where our Navy intercepts boats before they
43:28
reach Australian waters.
43:30
We bribe small Pacific Island nations to build concentration camps and we deposit those
43:34
people in them and they rock there for the rest of their lives or they can be sent to
43:38
other countries.
43:39
But they're never going to set foot in Australia.
43:40
The argument is that only affects several scores or hundreds of people and thousands
43:45
of people don't die in hazardous voyages trying to get to Australia because the people
43:50
smuggling industry dries up completely.
43:53
It makes a certain utilitarian consequentialist sense.
43:58
But there's something in the, in my gut that says you don't get to use people that way.
44:03
You don't, once, you once they're in your care, you have a duty of care over them and
44:07
they shouldn't be, you know, sowing their lips shut on hunger strikes in order to get
44:12
your attention about what your government is doing to them, even if it leads to a net
44:17
gain.
44:18
They're not just tools to achieve another outcome.
44:23
They have a sanctity in themselves.
44:25
Yeah, and this is where the language you're using right now is the Kantian language.
44:31
It is the deontological language, which is the temper to consequentialist language.
44:38
So one of the principles that Kant and others would say is non instrumentalism.
44:44
Do not use other people as an instrument to achieve an end that you want to achieve.
44:48
And Kant families, he said, treat people as ends unto themselves rather than a means
44:53
to an end.
44:55
And it's particularly perverse when if people are sowing their mouths shut, that actually
45:00
becomes more beneficial for the consequentialist view.
45:04
Because the more images of people sowing their mouths shut, you can send overseas, the
45:08
more it might dissuade people from trying to cross the borders.
45:12
So this is where a deliberate or a being complicit in causing harm and using people setting
45:19
an example.
45:20
I mean, think about back to when we're all in school and someone asks maybe somebody
45:24
else, you know, a bunch of people are talking, acting up or whatever, and the teacher makes
45:29
an example of one person.
45:30
I'm going to really punish this person hard in an unjustifiable way, because we know
45:35
that they weren't the only person involved here.
45:37
But that's going to set an example and start up other people from misbehaving.
45:42
And that is, I don't have an answer to that.
45:46
I actually don't have an answer to that because you go one way and the consequentialist would
45:51
say, hey, look, if it reduces misbehavior, it reduces people dying in rickety boats coming
45:56
to Australia, then it's worth it.
45:59
But then the deontologist in me, and there are both of them in everybody, it's saying,
46:05
I don't want to be using other people to achieve these ends.
46:10
So I mean, like, so from the ethics center perspective where I work, we look at all of
46:13
these different ethical theories, as well as things like virtue, ethics, and we look
46:18
at existentialist ethics, and we look at the ethics of care that comes from Carol Gilligan.
46:23
We look at all these different approaches that are often intentionally with each other
46:26
and contradictory as a toolkit that you pull out.
46:29
And you acknowledge when I'm using this hammer, maybe a screwdriver, you know, might have
46:33
a different answer to this, but I can't just use a hammer to solve this kind of problem.
46:37
And I mean, people hate it when I say this, but we have to just sit with an incomplete
46:45
solution sometimes and have a conversation and continually revise and reflect and be critical
46:50
and talk about it, but not be glib and not just fall into allowing knee-jerk reactions
46:57
or emotional or outraged to be the only force that is making our decisions.
47:02
We need to have good reasons.
47:04
So yeah, the non-instrumentalism, I think, is a really important kind of feature of this,
47:10
but there are sometimes where treating someone as a means to an end might be worth it.
47:15
So it's not going to be a black and white.
47:16
What would such a scenario be?
47:19
Well, look, if, I mean, look, the easy would be, the easy example would be the guy with
47:25
the trigger in the bomb, and I'm, you know, going to save lives by doing that.
47:32
That's not making an example of him, is it?
47:35
No, that's too easy.
47:36
That's a direct consequentialist thing.
47:38
I mean, I guess my mind goes to maybe the death penalty for drug importation in some
47:42
Asian countries, maybe, but I still don't think it's a great idea.
47:46
But, yeah, you know, having a very obvious public shooting of somebody who was importing
47:52
the code.
47:53
Let me give you an example where there's a really interesting discussion around what's the
47:58
appropriate level of punishment that we should inflict upon somebody when they're done
48:01
something wrong?
48:03
And kind of, if you just take it on the really rarefied abstract way of thinking about
48:08
the appropriate punishment, assuming that it works as a deterrent and all that kind
48:11
of stuff, it's just like just enough harm to stop that person from doing it again so
48:16
that it's not worth their time.
48:18
Just enough harm that it's visible enough that other people will see that it's not worth
48:22
their time to do it and all that kind of stuff, but no more.
48:25
But even if you accept that, even if you accept that the deterrent factor of punishment
48:29
is going to be useful there, you say, well, what if there are a thousand people committing
48:34
a crime and they're really hard to catch?
48:37
So you only catch one in a thousand people committing this particular crime.
48:42
In order for it to be a sufficient deterrent, maybe we have to punish that person more,
48:47
make an example of them.
48:49
Because if we could just catch all thousand and just punish them a little bit or even
48:53
catch 500 of them, punish them just enough, it'll be enough of deterrent that someone
48:56
else thinks, well, I'm not going to get away with it.
48:58
I'm probably going to 50, 50 chance I'll get caught and this bad thing's going to happen
49:01
to me.
49:02
So I won't do it.
49:03
Tim, we just got interrupted by a digital glitch and so we froze for a moment.
49:08
Part of this that intrigues me is the mindset of people who are kind of messianic in the
49:13
way that they're trying to change the world, whether that's inside institutions, inside
49:18
government, inside companies or outside it, like a renegade assassin.
49:23
There's a very compelling kind of narrative, moral narrative that goes along the lines
49:29
of, I'm willing to do the things that nobody else is willing to do.
49:33
I'm the person who identifies the problem that everybody knows exists and nobody else
49:38
has the stomach to take on.
49:40
And I am one of the few chosen people who has the gumption to take it on myself and get
49:45
my hands dirty.
49:47
And you will all condemn me, but secretly you'll also love me.
49:52
It I can feel the tug.
49:54
Yeah.
49:55
Well, I call this the Batman approach.
50:01
So Batman, I mean, look, in comic book, people are going to have different views on this,
50:06
but here's my riff.
50:07
That's not the point of this conversation to the comic book nerds.
50:11
Yeah, I know.
50:12
No, it's the philosopher in me.
50:14
Whenever I speak, there's like four other voices of people I know, kind of, well, actually,
50:17
so I kind of have to just put them to the side for a moment.
50:20
And then normally philosophers, in this case, they're people who read the book, you know,
50:23
parts of them actually.
50:24
Yeah, he actually.
50:27
But the Batman thing, the way I think about Batman is like, so here's my, here's my
50:32
view.
50:33
Superman is a deontologist, Batman is a consequentialist, Superman is really powerful.
50:41
He can do anything.
50:42
So what defines his moral view are the limits that he places on his actions, the duties that
50:49
he feels like he is bound to, and the restraint that he exercises based upon principle.
50:58
And Batman, though, is working in a corrupt system in a place that's, you know, run by
51:04
crime gangs and all this kind of stuff, nothing's being done about it.
51:08
And he's like, I'm going to do something about it, but in doing so, I'm going to compromise
51:14
certain things that I care about.
51:16
I'm going to turn myself into a monster.
51:18
I'm going to use violence to get these ends.
51:21
I'm going to go outside of the law.
51:23
I've already decided that the law is not enough.
51:25
I'll work with when I can, but I'm not going to kind of just, I'm not going to lobby and
51:30
vote and use my enormous wealth to create good.
51:33
I'm going to go and get my hands dirty in order to do the right thing.
51:39
And so he's in a way.
51:40
He's his figure.
51:41
He's saying, I will become the monster to make the world a better place.
51:45
So that you, you don't have to.
51:49
And that's all good and well until you get Batman's rivals and villains who often have
51:55
the same kind of idea.
51:58
But their morality is a little bit different, and they're in lies problem.
52:01
But the dirty hands, I think, is, the dirty hands kind of vigilante is a narrative that
52:05
I think we all kind of understand.
52:07
And sometimes we, we want, and there's a bit of cowardice in us saying we want it because
52:11
it's like, we're not willing to do it.
52:13
We're not willing to go and get our hands dirty to see justice done.
52:18
But we're willing to applaud someone who does have the courage to do that.
52:22
Your point about the villains is, is reminds me of one of the great villains of the 21st
52:27
century cinema, which is the Heath Ledger version of the Joker in the Dark Knight, who is
52:33
a counterpart to Batman and, you know, goes one step further and says, you think that
52:39
you're so high and mighty because you're fighting crime.
52:43
But in reality, nothing matters and even you are a hypocrite.
52:45
So let me put you through this series of moral conundrums, like the two fairies that are
52:50
parked on the harbour with this classic kind of prisoner's dilemma about which one is
52:55
going to, you know, one of them blows the other one up, then they all, you know, I kind
52:58
of remember the exact contours of the dilemma.
53:00
But these quite sophisticated sort of, you know, ethics 101 conundrums that the Joker
53:05
poses to try to tease out whether or not Batman really is all that or whether he's just
53:10
as full of shit as everybody else.
53:12
I mean, in a strange way, there's a parallel between the assassin or terrorists heroic
53:20
logic here and the reasoning of some people who work inside institutions like Dick Cheney.
53:28
I like, I'm thinking of the rhetoric around the war on terror after 9-11 did kind of tip
53:36
toe up to the edge of stop asking questions about whether or not what we're doing in Guantanamo
53:42
Bay is good or bad or constitutional or unconstitutional or torture or not torture.
53:48
Like we're willing to do the things that keep you safe.
53:51
We're willing to stand up and get our hands dirty when you are not.
53:56
So it reminds me also of the final scene of a few good men, which I don't know if you
53:59
remember, but Jack Nicholson's character, Colonel Jessup, is the bad guy who's a senior
54:03
military guy who has this amazing memorable speech when Tom Cruise is prosecuting him for
54:11
the death of one of the people who was under his care or military guy.
54:16
And he's basically saying you sleep at night because of the protection that people like
54:21
me provide you, you know, you live in a society in a culture that's surrounded by walls
54:26
and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns.
54:30
And now you have the intemperance and impunity to question the manner in which I provide
54:34
the very security that gives you the ability to question it, like sort of how dare you kind
54:39
of thing.
54:40
You have the luxury of not knowing what I know that Santiago's death while tragic probably
54:45
saved lives and my existence while grotesque and incomprehensible to you saves lives.
54:53
You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties.
54:57
You want me on that wall.
54:59
You need me on that wall.
55:01
And I feel the same, that same logic in application in the Unibumma's manifesto or in the supposed
55:10
rational of the suspective in this CEO's assassination.
55:15
Yeah.
55:16
And I'm sympathetic to that idea that there are things that we require to live the comfortable
55:24
safe lives that we have that are neither comfortable nor safe in their execution.
55:29
But then you get that other old question of like who watches the watches.
55:35
It's not a matter of Dick Cheney saying, do not question our methods.
55:43
Whether he could say our methods work, our methods are keeping you safe, but do question
55:49
them because it's in the questioning of them that you're able to see that they work,
55:54
see that they're safe to see that we are executing it with proportionality with necessity.
55:59
The risk is, and this is always the risk, I mean to invoke another political philosopher
56:03
from the age of another dead white guy, Thomas Hobbes and the Leviathan.
56:08
He said, civil war is the worst of all outcomes, people fighting against each other.
56:15
And if we have no governance, then it's just a war of all against all.
56:19
Everyone's just fighting each other for their thing.
56:20
So what we need, we need is a Leviathan.
56:22
We need this strong sovereign state that is unquestioned in its authority and power to
56:28
keep the peace.
56:30
And that's kind of what we're Chinese going, right?
56:32
He's like, you know, we are the unquestioned power.
56:35
His trust is, we'll keep the peace, but how can you trust the Leviathan?
56:39
You can't.
56:40
And so that's why, that's why after Hobbes came people like John Locke and liberalism,
56:44
which is about, which is about transparency and that transparency and accountability is
56:49
what matters.
56:50
And that's, I think, kind of what people are getting at with the assassination of Thompson
56:55
is where's the accountability.
56:58
So in the discourse around civil disobedience, one of the things around civil disobedience
57:03
like Gandhi and others is to say, we are going to break the law, we're going to go outside
57:09
the law.
57:10
We're told not to do this when we're going to push back against this because we think
57:13
it's justified, but we are also going to accept the consequences of our actions.
57:17
We are going to be visible in what we do.
57:20
We're going to be accountable for what we do.
57:22
And if we, if we allow the nonviolence to slip into violence, we are going to be responsible
57:27
for that.
57:28
And that's, I mean, he's perhaps a moral hero in the sense that he's taking more on
57:31
his shoulders than we can expect at most.
57:34
And a lot of people would say that his methods wouldn't have worked in a lot of other situations.
57:39
But it's the lack of transparency around the, the lone actor and their execution of, of
57:47
their moral will.
57:50
That's what worries me.
57:51
And would that be the main counterpoint then to wrap up?
57:53
We only have two minutes left here, Tim.
57:56
But if the point of this conversation is to try to complicate our easy moral understanding
58:02
of murder and shine some light on the tragedy of this assassination by actually addressing
58:12
rather than tiptoeing around the central moral conundrum, if there were a Ted Kaczynski
58:18
or a, you know, whoever the assassin is in this particular case, I'm saying, however
58:23
because there hasn't been a trial yet.
58:26
And what would you say to such a person to dissuade them from their claim that they're
58:35
doing the right thing?
58:37
Yeah, I mean, that's tough because also I'm aware there are lots of moral things that
58:42
I could say.
58:43
I could say, do, is this the proportional response?
58:46
Is there something else you can do?
58:48
Can you use force or coercion without violence?
58:51
Is there some way that you can get collective action, get a group of people together such
58:55
that you can have a critical mass of activity?
58:58
You know, is this really necessary?
59:00
Is this just an expression of your outrage?
59:03
You're very justifiable outrage at an unjust system?
59:08
Is this just to satisfy that outrage rather than to actually produce a beneficial outcome?
59:13
But I expect a lot of those would fall on deaf ears if you're stopping him from drawing
59:18
a gun from his waistband or something.
59:21
You need to get in earlier than that.
59:23
But I'm not sure there's much that can be said rationally at that moment.
59:27
But earlier, there can be things that we can do to talk about, okay, what world do we
59:33
want to live in?
59:34
What's the outcome that we want to see?
59:35
How do we get there?
59:37
And let us not accept these false narratives of, you know, law and order being all bad because
59:44
it protects the powerful or all good because it prevents assassinations.
59:48
Let's step into some ambiguity.
59:50
Let's step into some difficulty and use a toolkit to be able to solve that problem.
59:55
And it's probably glib, right, because I don't know how to solve the systemic injustices
59:58
in the world.
59:59
I wish I did.
1:00:00
And I wish just words could do that.
1:00:03
But perhaps if I were standing nearby and saw someone draw a gun, I would hope to have
1:00:10
the courage to be able to stop an act of violence, but also have the courage to be able to then
1:00:14
work with that person to try to solve those kinds of problems on a larger level.
1:00:18
But I'm not even sure I would have the courage to do that.
1:00:21
I think I'd probably run away as the vice president did in that situation because that's the
1:00:26
prudent thing to do in that situation.
1:00:28
Philosophy can help us justify, and it can help us understand and unpack and give reasons,
1:00:32
but it doesn't necessarily give us the tools to change people's behavior in a single
1:00:36
conversation.
1:00:37
Well, Tim, if it's any reassurance, I would have leapt on to the SS and I would have saved
1:00:42
the situation obviously because I've reclaimed this time superhero.
1:00:46
I think the takeaway is don't kill people, folks.
1:00:50
It's not the best solution to things, but it's worth understanding why some people think
1:00:54
that it is the best solution to things so that we can progress from there.
1:00:57
Tim, Dan, thank you.
1:00:58
It's been a pleasure.
1:00:59
Thanks, Josh.