Photo: Getty Images North America
Two separate incidents happened recently, different stories that have no relation to one another, unless you look a little closer. One story involves the disappearance of Thomas Medlin, a 15-year-old who disappeared three weeks ago after he went to Manhattan to meet someone he met online while playing the popular game Roblox. The other story involves the deaths of as many as ten people in the unusually cold weather New York has recently experienced; at least six of the dead were homeless people. Dr. Arthur Caplan is a professor of bioethics at NYU Langone Medical Center. He appeared on 710 WOR’s Mendte in the Morning program to suggest the common thread between the two stories: if the authorities had taken the right precautions and stepped in sooner- before there was a problem- perhaps all of those people would still be alive today.
Caplan told host Larry Mendte that kids need to be monitored when online because of the danger of predators on the Web, though he concedes that’s easier said than done: “Have you ever tried to monitor the behavior of a twelve-year-old online I mean, it’s impossible… [But] I think the manufacturers have to make the web a safer place, and I’m not sure how to do that. I’m no expert on that, but it seems to me there ought to be some liability. My kid gets hurt because somebody preys on them on the internet, I’m going to partly hold the internet operator responsible for not weeding out that kind of stuff online.”
As for the homeless, Dr. Caplan has a much easier solution to the problem: “When the temperature gets to these levels, you know what the rights are of people who are on the street- nothing! You don’t get to freeze with your rights on. Go force people into shelters, and here’s the word I used- forced. Let the cops go out, bring a social worker, if you want to do it in a nice way… I just think a civilized society doesn’t freeze people to death in the name of a cockamamie human rights argument.”
Photo Credit: Getty Images