Social insecurity:
Jr, David R Carlin
SOCIAL INSECURITY LETTER-BOMBS TO THE RESCUE DAVID R. CARLIN, JR. LET me make it plain at the outset that I'm not a supporter of the Social Security reform plan recently put forward by the...
...Stated more comprehensively, the rule says this: When there is no way of determining, either before the action or after, whether an action will cause the death of a human being, one is morally free to perform the action...
...But (he fact is that we're not sure when human life begins...
...LET me make it plain at the outset that I'm not a supporter of the Social Security reform plan recently put forward by the administration, the so-called "deterrence" plan...
...As the U .S...
...3. No more than 100 persons per month would be killed (which is fewer than those killed daily in traffic accidents...
...The fatalities would be mainly recipients, but would include a small number of friends and family members, as well as some juvenile delinquents stealing checks from mailboxes...
...and let the XSS be applied by a computer-driven robot...
...d state legislature...
...More importantly, it has to be kept in mind that it won't be the same twenty percent each month...
...Random poisoning of Social Security checks, it turns out, is just as morally defensible as abortion...
...Among more temperate, critics of the deterrence strategy has been the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, which said that it would be morally permissible to stockpile letter-bombs at the Social Security mail room on two conditions: (a) that none of them is ever actually, mailed out...
...The bombs would go off as soon as die envelope is opened, killing anyone within a radius of 5 to 10 feet...
...Jones, for instance, may elect to run the risk of opening her envelope from January through June...
...For the plan to work it is essential that a certain number of old folks get blown away each month and that these deaths receive wide publicity...
...There is a lethal poison (let us call it XSS) which is so undetcctable that even Quincy would mistake its operation for death by natural causes...
...but by living frugally through the first half of the year, she can put aside enough to permit her to skip her July benefits...
...2. In any given month, the small chance (about one in 100,000) of getting abomb in one'senvelope would cause up to 20 percent of all recipients to discard their checks unopened...
...David R. Carlin, Jr., a previous contributor, is a senator in the Rhode Island state legislature...
...But the truly needy (and this administration has always beenxon-cerned with the truly needy) wouldn't be deterred by a mere 1 out of 100,000 chance of.an explosion...
...There is, however, a modification of mis plan which will retain its admirable technical qualities while eliminating its morally objectionable features...
...Moreover, it causes death, not immediately on contact, but in a period fron five to fifteen days after...
...While it is generally recognized (at least by those among us who are not moral Neanderthals) that the legitimacy of abortion is one of the great ethical discoveries of our time, what is not so widely appreciated is that the principle justifying abortion has much wider application than that...
...What follows from this doubt, as the court so clearly understood, is that abortion is permissible...
...You'll recall the plan's leading features...
...But the rule would justify a potentially homicidal action whose outcome we could never determine - that is...
...We'd then have a situation in which it would be quite impossible to tell, either before the mailing or after, whether any human beings would be killed...
...Supreme Court eloquently said in Roe v. Wade: "We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins...
...No erne can convince me," he said, "thata wealthy American would ever again be foolish enough to open a Social Security check...
...And mis means - as the bishops among others have well said - that the plan suffers from an irremediable moral flaw: it directly aims at the death of innocent persons...
...Clearly this rule will not justify the administration's proposed letter-bombs, since before the act of mailing we know that somebody (though we're not sure who) will be killed and after the act we know that this or that particular person has been killed...
...By and large the pro-choice party agrees with the anti-abortion party that if the fetus is a human person, it should not be aborted...
...let zero be one of those numbers - so that for any given month, year, or series of years up to and including forever, it is quite possible that no one would be killed...
...Let a computer randomly select a certain number of Social Security checks per month for treatment with XSS...
...This is what I mean by the when-in-doubt rule...
...and (b) that this stockpiling is a mere transitional step toward a less violent solution to the Social Security problem...
...For one thing, in many cases they'll be able to fall back on support from relatives...
...an action which (a) might well kill someone but (b) could produce no evidence, either before or after the event, that the killing in fact took place...
...The practice of direct mailing to the recipient's bank would be discontinued...
...The administration has convincingly refuted the contention that great hardship would fall on the twenty per-cenjt who chose to forego their benefits...
...I certainly know Nancy and I wouldn't...
...The trouble with this of course is that the deterrent would cease to be credible once word got out that no one was actually being killed...
...1 refer to what might be called the "when-in-doubt rule...
...The resulting savings would put the Social Security system on a sound financial basis with little or no increase in payroll taxes...
...Now we currently have available the technology needed to meet the morally strict requirements of the when-in-doubt rule while at the same time accomplishing the essential goals of the administration's letter-bomb proposal...
...As President Reagan pointed out at a recent press conference, the plan provides a nearly sure-fire way of distinguishing needy from non-needy recipients...
...At the same time I can't agree with the plan's more strident critics, many of whom, though no doubt well-intentioned, are being skillfully manipulated by a handful of highly trained Grey Panthers...
...When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the develoment of man's knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer...
...1. On a random basis, letter-bombs would be included with a small number of Social Security checks each month...
...Let me explain...
Vol. 110 • February 1983 • No. 4
