There is evidence that people blame victims for illnesses that are perceived to be largely self-inflicted. Stigmas surrounding various afflictions and an often accompanying “blame-the-victim” mentality have been studied for decades. Lung cancer probably would not be the top cancer killer, killing more per year than breast cancer and prostate cancer combined, were it not for the fact that many chose to pursue a life-long habit of smoking. Nevertheless, there is a clear connection between smoking and lung cancer, and despite its addictiveness, smoking is usually at first a choice.
Of course, whether lung cancer should be understood as a “self-inflicted” disease is still controversial because a significant number of lung cancer victims never smoked.
Lung cancer victims ought to receive less consideration than one would give victims of other diseases, for the simple fact that a majority of lung cancer victims can be held responsible for their own illness. This fact might incline many to answer positively to the above question. I intend to pursue this general question in connection with a more specific one: ought victims of lung cancer, because of its connection to smoking, to have their needs and interests taken into less consideration than the needs and interests of victims of equally serious but less avoidable cancers, such as breast cancer? It seems that one can avoid being at high risk of lung cancer by not smoking, but one cannot avoid, or least not to the same degree, being at risk of breast cancer. But does, or must, some form of social justice apply to these cases also? Certainly we could say that poetic justice applies to cases in which people hurt themselves through their own reckless or negligent behavior, and we tend to feel worse for those who are not victims of their own reckless behavior than for those who are. There is a popular tendency to think that justice is served when, following the proverbial expression, people who play with fire get burned. Disease, ethics, justice, lung cancer, punishment, research funding I.
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