Did the Healthcare CEO Deserve it?
The Ugly Consequences of Bad Moral Arguments
In a memorable scene in the 1992 movie Unforgiven, a young man tries to console his conscience after ambushing and killing a member of the group they believe are bad guys. He says out loud to himself, “I guess he had it comin’,” to which the grizzled old Clint Eastwood character famously replies, “We all have it comin’ kid.”
Thus follows the moral deliberations of the lawless. It’s part of our fascination with the “Wild West.” It makes for captivating entertainment, but would you have wanted to live there? Do you ever actually wish for that sort of apocalyptic, post-civilizational future that Hollywood likes to depict?
You’ll say “no” of course, but sometimes we get a glimpse of a kind of moral reasoning that, if taken seriously, will hasten an ugly future nevertheless.
The Assassination of Brian Thompson
The latest example of this moral foolishness comes in the form of a Wild West style murder in which the CEO of United Healthcare was ambushed and gunned down in the street. His killer was not a homeless crackhead trying to rob him. It wasn’t a gangland stray bullet. This assassin is an Ivy-league educated young man, a child of privilege from a wealthy family. The murder was a demented form of activism based on his professed righteous indignation toward the American health insurance industry.
His brief, handwritten manifesto spells out his rationale, such as it is. You can read it for yourself. My interest is not just in this single individual, but in the larger response. A lot has been made of the online support for the assassin’s reasons and motives. The fact that a lot of people are sympathetic to an act like this demands closer inspection.
Is there a Moral Case for Assassination?
The recent movie Bonhoeffer is about the true story of a bold Christian theologian who openly opposed the Nazis and willingly paid for it with his life (spoiler alert). At one point Bonhoeffer was asked to play a pivotal role in a plot to assassinate Hitler. As someone who had once been a pacifist, he wrestled with the moral question of whether or not he could justify being part of the plan to kill the Fuhrer.
Ultimately he determined that it was the right thing to do, given the dire and historic nature of what was at stake. Clearly his circumstances were of the rarest kind. If we formulate his decision as a general moral principle, it would be something like, “If a powerful leader is engaged in mass murder, genocide or large-scale atrocities, and there is no legal or political recourse for stopping him, it is morally permissible to stop him by killing him.”
Compare that with the justification or motives for other well-known political assassinations: Archduke Ferdinand of Austria (which launched WWI), Lincoln, JFK. We could throw in celebrity assassinations like John Lennon. What about attempts on Reagan and Trump? Has any of these come anywhere close to the Bonhoeffer principle and the case for killing Hitler?
To take a human life requires that you clear a high bar for moral justification. There are very, very few scenarios that pass the test. To kill prominent persons in high profile ways (e.g., assassination) will always be wrong unless the circumstances are so extreme as to warrant it.
Depraved Reasoning will Get More People Killed
I would put infamous assassination attempts (successful or not) like those above into three basic categories: (1) People who are fully mentally ill, (2) People who are not (completely) mentally ill but whose cause is evil, and (3) People who are not (completely) mentally ill, who may believe in a good cause, but who are utterly misguided or deluded in their actions.
Reagan’s would-be assassin, who dreamed of getting the attention of (and finding true love with) actress Jodie Foster, belongs to the first category. Lee Harvey Oswald had adopted Marxism, gone pro-Castro and loved the Soviets. I would put him in the second category. The Trump assassin may belong there too, if in fact the Iranians had a role in it.
And then there’s the third category, the one where most of the confusion lies. Consider Sirhan Sirhan, who murdered RFK, Sr. As a Palestinian, his cause had a lot of supporters then just as it still does today. The moral case can be made for certain actions and policies in the Middle East on that basis. But Sirhan was deluded to think that killing a Kennedy had a legitimate connection to his cause.
We could site many similar examples, including murdering abortion doctors or oil executives for the respective moral causes each represents. To give oneself moral permission to do otherwise heinous things is a form of self-delusion that magnifies the depravity to which people can be prone. It is a form of lashing out.
It applies to lesser crimes too. In recent years we’ve seen mobs of people grant themselves permission to loot stores, to destroy property and even burn portions of cities. Their childish reasoning was that the U.S. has sins in its past or that there are injustices within various systems, so therefore I have a green light to steal and vandalize.
The Soviet dissident prisoner Alexander Solzhenitsyn said that most people who do evil have to find a way to tell themselves that they’re doing something good. “Ideology,” he wrote, “is what gives the evildoing its long-sought justification” (The Gulag Archipelago).
Aldous Huxley explained how this works:
The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats (Chrome Yellow).
This explains the cold, jaded and heartless responses of people across social media to the cold-blooded murder of a husband and father of two. How many of them have asked given serious thought to the specific issues the murderer cited in his manifesto (and on the bullets themselves)?
Space doesn’t permit a long detour into the fairness of health insurance systems and their procedures. While few people are fans of the system(s), the assassin’s case for bloodshed is ridiculously simplistic - as if to say, ‘We pay a lot overall and our national health statistics aren’t great, so I simply must murder a health insurance CEO.’ The gaping oversights in this perspective have been pointed out by NPR, among others.
Healthcare is a limited resource, and will always be rationed. It’s rationed in Canada, in the UK, and everywhere else. Obamacare is far from immune. Single-payer systems have anecdotes aplenty of angry people with stories. The logic of the murderer could justify the assassination of the heads of Medicare, Medicaid, the VA, England’s National Health Services, and others, on a similar basis.
At the end of Unforgiven, as the Eastwood character is about to exact revenge on the Gene Hackman character, the latter, having already been shot once, says to him, “I don’t deserve to die like this.” Eastwood’s reply is another perfect example of Wild West moral theory: “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”
I would suggest that if we want something like a civilized society, we need to confront directly the ravings of privileged, miseducated fools who imagine themselves as heroes. We should demolish the dreamy pretentions of their infantile morality, and heap our shame on adults (especially prominent people - looking at you, Liz Warren) who encourage such bloodlust with their equivocating, weak-tea responses to looters, vandals, and most of all, murderers.