An electronic road sign in Seattle read “One Less CEO, Many More to Go.” The murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson brought celebration not just in Seattle. People refused to help find the alleged killer Luigi Mangione, and others cooed over his good looks.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro is entirely right to unequivocally condemn the online praise of the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. “In America, we do not kill people in cold blood to resolve policy differences or express a viewpoint,” Shapiro said. The governor pointed out, “In a civil society, we are all less safe when ideologues engage in vigilante justice.”
Some people argue that this killing is somehow justified as a way of “fighting back” against a corrupt healthcare system.
Let’s think this idea through a bit. The murder of one CEO hardly topples the “corrupt insurance system.” If anything, it raises healthcare costs even higher because top administrators may now feel the need to hire extra security. To topple the system, advocates for vigilante justice would need to kill countless other CEOs, company presidents, and financial officers, and not just at UnitedHealthcare but all other insurance companies.
After all the bodies are piled up, then what? There would be no one left to administer healthcare insurance companies, and they would all close. Would we really be in a better world without any health insurance at all? Do we each want to pay out of pocket for all of our healthcare needs?
We must not be frightened nor cajoled into accepting evil as deliverance from evil.
Maybe we would be better off with a single-payer system in which there is no private health insurance. But a single-payer system is also imperfect. Such systems also have their share of serious problems, including some of the same problems faced in the United States. The problems of the healthcare system are not all magically solved by governmental administration of healthcare. If the operation of the DMV is any indication, the problems in some ways could get worse with a single-payer system. In any case, single-payer systems are also administered by imperfect people with incentives of their own that do not always align with the interests of patients. Are we to resort to murder again in this instance?
If striking back against a corrupt healthcare system is justification for murder, then are we also to begin killing to correct our corrupt political system? Shall we target our teachers to (somehow) fix our broken education system? Who can claim athletics or show business or the travel industry or anything else we do together doesn’t have its own share of corruption and malfeasance? Can our idealistic comrades who cheer on murder point to a single institution that doesn’t have its share of bad apples, corrupt practices, and harmed individuals in its wake?
Are we to kill people to purify society? Alexander Solzhenitsyn answers, “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” All human systems and organizations are at least partially corrupt because they are all made of humans, who are at least partially corrupt.
A fundamental principle of justice is that people are innocent until proven guilty. No individual should be punished for an alleged crime, let alone punished with the death penalty (!), without due process of law. It is a paradigm of injustice to allow one person to be the judge, the jury, and the executioner of another person who has violated no law. No one who cares about justice can ignore this fundamental principle.
The poet Robert Hayden had it right: “We must not be frightened nor cajoled into accepting evil as deliverance from evil. We must go on struggling to be human, though monsters of abstractions police and threaten us.” Even early, St. Paul condemned the fundamental folly of doing evil so that good may come from it. Even earlier than that, Jesus was the ultimate scapegoat so we could stop scapegoating each other.
