E.G.

There are muckety-mucks, and then there are regular people.

Muckety-mucks are the ones with a lot of influence, visibility, perceived authority, etc. Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO who was recently assassinated, is an example of a muckety-muck.

I am an example of a regular person. Most or all of the people who might read these words are, I assume, regular people, too.

It's generally agreed that many or all major problems afflicting our society are caused by complex interactions involving both regular people and muckety-mucks. For example, insofar as our health care system is unjust, this is so not only because of decisions made by various muckety-mucks, but also because large numbers of regular people swallow bad ideas, reject good ideas, vote for corrupt politicians, etc.

But when we are looking for someone to blame for our society's ills, we seem to strongly prefer to point our fingers at muckety-mucks rather than regular people. I suppose this is why Brian Thompson's killer has so many supporters.

That's a mistake, I think. When it comes to large-scale social problems, I think that regular people usually deserve at least as much blame as muckety-mucks do.

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Some people say that regular people are in effect brainwashed because they get most of their information from misleading sources. They know not what they do, and therefore they do not deserve to be blamed for their contributions to the injustices of the world.

But first of all, muckety-mucks can be brainwashed too. Brian Thompson, for instance, spent twenty years of his life working in the insurance industry. As many have said and seen, workplaces can be sites of cult-like indoctrination, and people in leadership positions are often the ones who have drunk more of the company Kool-Aid than anybody else.

And second, I think this sort of talk of brainwashing is usually overblown. I think muckety-mucks and regular people alike usually have enough rational autonomy to be morally responsible for their decisions; I don't think watching Fox News or working in the insurance industry are typically enough to really brainwash you. So, I think few if any of the relevant agents have a legitimate brainwashing excuse.

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When muckety-mucks do bad things that make the world worse, they're often either pursuing some major benefit (like advancing their career) or trying to avoid some major loss (like being fired). By contrast, when regular people do bad things that make the world worse, e.g., when they cast a vote for a corrupt politician, they often do it for free, or even at personal cost, and for no real reason.

Ceteris paribus, when you do something that somehow props up an unjust state of affairs, you deserve relatively harsher blame if you do it for no reason, and relatively milder blame if you do it for some reason, even a self-interested reason.

Also, the present point bears on the efficacy of blame. In general, if someone has no reason to φ, but they know that φ-ing is regarded as condemnable, then they might be very unlikely to φ. But if someone has a strong incentive to φ, then the the fact that others regard φ-ing as condemnable might be very unlikely to deter them.

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The practice of heaping blame on muckety-mucks rather than regular people reflects a view that muckety-mucks are the ones with all the real power and are therefore the ones who are most responsible when things go wrong. But how much power to address major social ills does a muckety-muck really have?

Suppose Brian Thompson had woken up one morning with a new conscience and had decided to do everything in his power to reshape UnitedHealthcare into a company that sacrifices profit wherever necessary in order to do right by people. That would have been a very interesting experiment, but I think we can say what the result would have been. He'd have been immediately blocked in his efforts by other key decision-makers in the company, and eventually he'd have been forced to relent or resign.

It is not at all clear to me that there was much of anything Brian Thompson could have done in his capacity as CEO to make UnitedHealthcare into a more ethical company.

Meanwhile, regular people have quite a lot more power than they often seem to think they've got. For example, if all of the regular people in the US were to come together and make a clear demand for proper health care reform, and were to withhold support from any politician who stands in the way, etc., then it would happen.

Once we recognize that regular people—at least collectively, if not individually—have much more power than is commonly recognized, then we should be willing to blame regular people when they choose to use their power to make the world worse rather than better. We're the baddies.