When Martin Shkreli raised the price of Retrophin, a pharmaceutical used to treat AIDS, from $13.50 to $750.00 per dose, there was outrage. Shkreli, who has since been arrested for fraud unrelated to the price increase, insisted that this was free enterprise. There was no moral issue. If anything, it was morally right for him to maximize the profits of his company.
I thought, what if I broke into Shkreli’s home in the middle of the night and stole his laptop computer, watches, and cameras.
Shkreli would probably think I had robbed him. He would probably– I can’t quote him on it– call the police, if he could, and have me arrested for trespassing and burglary. And I would look him in the eye, in court, and say, “What’s your problem? What’s wrong with taking your stuff? You don’t even really own it.” Even better, if I could say that from afar, some other country, which did not have any kind of extradition treaty with the U.S. And I would say, “what is your definition of moral”?
He might say, “it’s wrong to steal”. And I would ask, “how do you know?” Maybe he believes in the bible. Maybe he believes that one should always treat others the way one would want to be treated. Maybe he believes something like “always treat others the way you yourself would like to be treated”.
Or maybe he believes it’s a dog-eat-dog world and you just take whatever you can whenever you can because that’s what everybody else would do if they could.
No, that’s not possible, is it?
He might believe that such miracles as Retrophin are only possible thanks to our wonderful capitalist system which holds that the owner of a particular item has absolute control over its use and distribution and price. Of course, the makers and sellers of Retrophin were already doing quite well before he jacked up the price, and it had been developed under a system with the built-in expectation of a certain cost to the drug, and that had worked, and it has been shown that most pharmaceutical companies spend more money on advertising and marketing than they do on developing drugs, so they can’t be serious about argument that the high price is the cost of developing advanced drugs.
More likely a tax-payer funded university research lab developed the basics of the drug and then a drug company bought in somewhat later.
But if we were all in a wagon training headed west in 1871 and we were crossing a desert and Mr. Shkreli happened to own the only bottle of water left and everyone else was about to die, would it be his “right” to sell it for the exclusive use of the highest bidder, and let everyone else die?
I dislike these allegories. What Mr. Shkreli is doing is already essentially the same thing: AIDS patients need Retrophin to survive: Mr. Shkreli is extorting a wonderful price. It is extortion. Extortion is wrong.
[whohit]The Ethics of the Unethical: Martin Shkreli[/whohit]