By what kind of calculation have you derived this?
I admit, I haven’t sat down and calculated it; it was merely an impression that I had recieved. I’m not sure whether the number of deaths is necessarily an accurate measure of evil—torture, for example, is evil but results in no deaths, and the possibility of an afterlife may mean that death is not, in and of itself, always evil—but I’ll accept that there is at least some correlation with the figure you have chosen.
So. Let me take a look at the page that you have provided (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm). I see that the two leading causes of death are heart disease and cancer, adding up to close to half of the deaths for 2009. Heart disease is caused, in large part, by such things as poor diet and insufficient exercise (http://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm). By this measure, therefore, any popular restaurant that does not serve healthy food (and only healthy food, or at least if there is less healthy food then it is clearly marked as such and not more expensive) is encouraging poor diet, increasing mortality due to heart disease, and is therefore evil. In fact, something like 34% of US adults have obesity as a heart disease risk factor (the restaurants are not the only holders of blame here) - and that’s not the highest risk factor (inactivity is, at 53%).
As to cancer, the major villain there is tobacco, estimated to be responsible for 30% of cancer deaths and increasing. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7017215). Yet people still sell cigarettes (and other people still buy them—I do not understand why anyone would want to actually spend money on this, yet amazingly they do).
That’s a clearly free-willed agency involved in over 30% of heart disease and cancer deaths, which make up over one-third of total deaths. So that’s over 10% of total deaths. Before even looking at murders, suicides, and chronic lower respiratory diseases (I expect to find tobacco, and therefore the tobacco industry, as a major culprit there as well). I suspect that a closer analysis may increase that figure.
On the other hand, there are deaths that can have no human agency involved. A common example here is deaths due to natural disasters. Here’s a page (http://voices.yahoo.com/worst-natural-disasters-2009-5105563.html) that claims to list the ten worst natural disasters of 2009, worldwide. Total deaths: 10469, including 10000 for the H1N1 flu pandemic. The tenth disaster on the list had only three fatalities, so unless there were a whole lot of disasters in 2009, there can’t have been all that many fatalities due to natural disasters.
...to get a really good idea of what’s going on here, I’d need to sit down for a long time with a pretty complete set of statistics. I don’t have a full analysis to back up my claim here, yet.
I admit, I haven’t sat down and calculated it; it was merely an impression that I had recieved. I’m not sure whether the number of deaths is necessarily an accurate measure of evil—torture, for example, is evil but results in no deaths, and the possibility of an afterlife may mean that death is not, in and of itself, always evil—but I’ll accept that there is at least some correlation with the figure you have chosen.
So. Let me take a look at the page that you have provided (http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm). I see that the two leading causes of death are heart disease and cancer, adding up to close to half of the deaths for 2009. Heart disease is caused, in large part, by such things as poor diet and insufficient exercise (http://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm). By this measure, therefore, any popular restaurant that does not serve healthy food (and only healthy food, or at least if there is less healthy food then it is clearly marked as such and not more expensive) is encouraging poor diet, increasing mortality due to heart disease, and is therefore evil. In fact, something like 34% of US adults have obesity as a heart disease risk factor (the restaurants are not the only holders of blame here) - and that’s not the highest risk factor (inactivity is, at 53%).
As to cancer, the major villain there is tobacco, estimated to be responsible for 30% of cancer deaths and increasing. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7017215). Yet people still sell cigarettes (and other people still buy them—I do not understand why anyone would want to actually spend money on this, yet amazingly they do).
That’s a clearly free-willed agency involved in over 30% of heart disease and cancer deaths, which make up over one-third of total deaths. So that’s over 10% of total deaths. Before even looking at murders, suicides, and chronic lower respiratory diseases (I expect to find tobacco, and therefore the tobacco industry, as a major culprit there as well). I suspect that a closer analysis may increase that figure.
On the other hand, there are deaths that can have no human agency involved. A common example here is deaths due to natural disasters. Here’s a page (http://voices.yahoo.com/worst-natural-disasters-2009-5105563.html) that claims to list the ten worst natural disasters of 2009, worldwide. Total deaths: 10469, including 10000 for the H1N1 flu pandemic. The tenth disaster on the list had only three fatalities, so unless there were a whole lot of disasters in 2009, there can’t have been all that many fatalities due to natural disasters.
...to get a really good idea of what’s going on here, I’d need to sit down for a long time with a pretty complete set of statistics. I don’t have a full analysis to back up my claim here, yet.