When Brian Thompson was shot to death, something strange — and disturbing — happened: The gunman was lauded. Why? Because his victim was the C.E.O. of one of the largest health insurance companies in the country. And so the shooter, observers assumed, must be a victim of those companies.
Friends of the man accused of the killing have said that he suffered from sometimes debilitating back pain. And while the gunman’s motives remain unknown and might always be obscure, this is precisely the sort of medical issue that could lead one to detest the opaque, fractured American health care system and the insurers who profit by denying and delaying coverage for expensive treatments. Observers who share this anger have turned the accused man into a folk hero, sharing gleeful rage about the health system.
The celebration of the gunman suggests that many people believe the killing was justified. Since I’m going to argue that this is deeply and importantly wrong, I expect that many readers will think, “It sounds like you’ve never lived with real pain or had to navigate the labyrinthine hellscape that is our health care and insurance system.” I wish that were the case.
In 2015, my foot was blown apart in a motorcycle accident. I was told that I would probably lose the foot, but somehow doctors pulled it back together over the course of six surgeries. After the first five surgeries, I was given terrible advice about how to wean off my opioid medication and endured 29 days of agonizing withdrawal. I was told I’d never walk again, but with years of physical therapy, I graduated from walker to cane to walking unassisted. To this day, I live with varying amounts of pain, and I always will.
The American health care system being what it is, my partner and I spent years fighting with insurance companies to cover all aspects of my care. After one of my surgeries, I was surprised by an unexpected piece of mail, hand-delivered by a courier. The letter was a bill from just one of my hospitals, for just one of my surgeries, for an astronomical amount. My insurance company had denied coverage.
It took dozens of hours over the course of weeks to settle this bill, which happened when someone at the insurance company finally spotted the administrative error that led to the denial of coverage. To add insult to injury, I learned that the amount the hospital charged my insurance company was a fraction of what the hospital had charged me in that hand-delivered bill.
So believe me: I get the rage. The supposed motives assigned to the shooter may well be understandable. But not everything understandable is justifiable. This tragic situation should motivate us to change the institutions and structures that have failed so many people. But not to give murder a pass, and especially not to glorify it.
I want to explain why. Let’s start with a claim that we don’t usually have to make explicit but that seems to be under real scrutiny in this case: Murder is wrong. Indeed, murder is by definition wrongful killing. So if Brian Thompson was murdered, then the killer was wrong to do it, because murder includes the concept of wrongness.
Those celebrating the gunman seem to endorse the view that the killing was not wrong, which means it wasn’t murder; it must be, instead, a justified killing. This is not a novel concept, as many other forms of killing are held by some people to be justified: killing in self-defense, killing in a just war and, depending on one’s view, perhaps even state-sanctioned executions.
The question this raises is what could possibly justify Mr. Thompson’s killing? Shooting an unsuspecting civilian in the back does not resemble any paradigm of justified killing. The answer seems to be that his role in the health insurance industry justified his death — that his job meant he did terrible things or was a bad person.
This is where I think many people are making a mistake. They sympathize with the accused man’s apparent situation, even though the details to this day remain murky, and move from sympathy to excusing his action. But that move is illicit. Feeling bad for someone’s plight — or even sharing it — doesn’t make that person’s actions permissible. The accused man may well have been wronged by the health care system, as many people reading this most likely have. But he still committed murder.
People may also be responding to a sense of vengeance, or even a sort of cosmic justice, because it can feel good when bad things happen to people they think are bad. This type of belief in the existence of a moral desert is deeply seductive, which explains, among other things, the popularity of revenge narratives in movies and books. Audiences love watching Liam Neeson brutally pay back violence to those who live by violence.
I am skeptical of desert views. I tend to think that it’s not necessarily good when bad things happen, even to bad people. But that’s a difficult and contentious theoretical debate, and we don’t have to get into it, because even if we concede that bad people deserve bad outcomes, I think we should still obviously reject the idea that bad people deserve to be killed by a vigilante. And we should all be grateful to reject that view, since many of us have done things we’re not proud of or might love someone who is deeply flawed. Brian Thompson was also a father, a husband and a son, and presumably had dear friends and other loved ones. Along one dimension of his life, he played a role that many Americans find objectionable; but we are, all of us, multidimensional.
Ethics is hard. And not always in a technical sense. The argument that Mr. Thompson’s killing was wrong is not logically sophisticated, nor does it take significant expertise to make. What’s difficult, rather, is to live in the messy middle of all our important moral conversations — not only about health care, but also about politics, climate change, the war in Gaza, abortion and a million other hot-button issues. A killing can be simultaneously wrong and understandable; but by noting some sympathy or shared rage, one should not for a moment think that I have undermined the case for deep moral concern that a person was killed. Many things can be true at once, and we must be capable of holding them all in our heads at the same time.
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