As a former philosophy student, the case of Luigi Mangione, United Healthcare’s CEO’s assassin, and the public’s response to him has surfaced a host of interesting moral questions for me. Above all, this case has revealed something uncomfortable about us as a people – that we’re not all that concerned about murder and violence in and by itself, but rather who is killed matters more.
The internet is overripe with news stories, opinion pieces, and social media posts about the who, what, where, why and how of this story, so I’ll save you, the reader, from reading another background here.
The public response to this case, in my opinion, is what’s driving this story. Had Mangione shot any other random person on the street for any other random reason, most of us would be on one side of the story – the right side. In this case, the right side is up for debate contingent on who you are, how much wealth you have, and how willing you are to stew in hard moral questions. Of course we can’t ignore who Mangione is either. One can argue that his sex, race, class, education and background have helped his positive public support.
Mangione assassinated a man who’s the poster child of injustice for millions of Americans. He killed a man who has indirectly hurt, harmed and killed millions of Americans by standing in the way of them receiving care. This is the country where two-thirds of the population doesn’t trust the medical system due to cost unpredictabilities, and with some of the highest medical debt in the world. People’s latent frustration and anger at the health care system has found expression in this killing, and for Mangione that has meant strong support from the general public.
Reddit has been flooded with posts analyzing everything on his various social media channels to even his Goodreads’ collection (including recent comments on different posts) leading to conclusions like: “Kind-hearted, smart kid”. T-shirts are in circulation and people without any known connection to him have imprinted themselves with permanent tattoos with his face and name. The overarching consensus is that Luigi Mangione is a hero.
Of course there will always be people who are outside the majority opinion – an egregious act, violence is never the answer; this is no way to serve justice – are some of the other broad responses.
No matter where you stand on this issue, we can agree that it’s not the killing alone that has riled the public, but rather the context around the killing; and ultimately who ate the bullet and what they represent.
Most people would stand with the woman who kills her partner after years of suffering from domestic abuse. “He had it coming,” people would say. Which is what Mangione said in his manifesto: “These parasites had it coming.”
Righteousness, I don’t think, is cut in stone. Violence is somewhat baked into our social fabric, whether we like it or not. Our tax dollars fund wars that kill millions of people to protect ideologies that we think will save the world. Sometimes the morally wrong thing to do is the righteous thing to do. Even the Hindu Bhagavad Gita starts with the God, Krishna, telling the warrior, Arjun, to go into war with his cousins and teacher on the opposite side even if it means to kill – because in that moment that is what needs to be done, morally right or wrong.
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Nick Seebruch, editor
