Luigi Mangione’s Apologists Are Undermining the Pursuit of Social Justice

I am an ethics professor, and in my moral philosophy classes, I often appeal to the universal belief in the immorality of murder to show why moral relativism—the view that morality is contextual and subjective—is mistaken. My expectation until now has been that students will agree with me. After witnessing the public response to the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, allegedly by Luigi Mangione, I am no longer that confident.

It has been shocking to see the gleeful response by influencers on social media. It was even more shocking to hear politicians like Senator Elizabeth Warren say, “This is a warning that if you push people hard enough, they . . . start to take matters into their own hands.”

But especially concerning is a recent survey from Emerson College Polling of 1,000 registered voters and what it tells us about young people’s attitudes to the killing. An amazing 41 percent of eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-olds said the murder of the United Healthcare CEO was “somewhat acceptable” or “completely acceptable.” That’s more than the combined number of those young people who said that the murder was either “completely unacceptable” or “somewhat unacceptable.” In the survey, older people were significantly less likely to condone the killing, with only 10 percent saying that the killing was somewhat or completely acceptable, and a supermajority (68 percent) of respondents rejecting the killer’s actions. But sympathy for the killer was higher among younger respondents and Democrats, reflecting influencers and politicians who have found excuses for Mangione’s actions. 

Much media commentary has focused on what these views tell us about public frustration with the US private health insurance system. But especially concerning is the reluctance of many, including Senator Warren, to condemn the murder of a fellow human being.

Do all these apologists for Thompson’s murder understand what they’re endorsing? Their words betray the ascendancy of the view that the morality of actions depends on political circumstances rather than the intrinsic gravity of the action itself.

This toxic philosophy has been tied to the uptick in political violence that has become normalized in the United States in recent years. Examples of this include violence during the Black Lives Matter protests, the January 6 riot on Capitol Hill, and, more recently, the two assassination attempts on Donald Trump during his presidential election campaign. After the first Trump assassination attempt in Pennsylvania, democratic Colorado representative Steven Woodrow brazenly tweeted that “the last thing we need is sympathy for the devil but here we are.”

The Mangione halo effect, in other words, is not just a product of his Ivy League education, his youthful good looks, or his own health struggles. It is a reflection of a process that has been in play for several decades now, whereby a public commitment to the sanctity of life—which holds that human beings have intrinsic value and that it is always wrong to take an innocent human life—has been replaced by the politics of grievance and resentment that permits and even praises political violence as a last resort against excesses of corporate or government power. The political priorities of many, in other words, have shifted from the dignity of victims of violence to the dignity of disenfranchised members of society who are driven to violence as a last resort.

Some might argue that this crime ultimately reflects economic inequalities in American society, specifically, unequal access to healthcare and corporate exploitation of the sick and the injured. But economic distress is often perceived by individuals not just as resource deprivation but also as a loss of identity and agency—as political theorist Francis Fukuyama notes in his 2018 book Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment. To provide one example: to be unemployed is not just an economic condition but it also has social implications for how you see yourself and how others view you. If you are unemployed, you may have a diminished sense of self-worth, and your ability to participate in social life and initiatives that promote the common good may also be diminished. The dignity of work, in contrast, gives someone pride in himself and gives him a sense that he is contributing to the common good of society. This link between economics and identity can explain why many Americans appear to identify strongly with the anger that appears to have motivated Luigi Mangione. It also explains why some can no longer see the humanity of the victim in this crime but instead sympathize with the perpetrator. 

This murder has already generated a conversation about how to reform healthcare in the United States. It may very well lead to concessions from healthcare companies about the kind and scope of coverage they provide, though, notably, Mangione and his parents were not policyholders of UnitedHealthcare. It does not help that some health insurers have refused funding for chemotherapy to terminally ill patients but have offered to pay for assisted suicide.

The solution is unclear. Some people call for a radical overhaul of US healthcare to create a British-style National Health Service, predicated on the view, to quote NHS architect Aneurin Bevan, that “no society can legitimately call itself civilized if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means.” But the NHS faces a host of problems including skyrocketing waiting lists for hospital treatment. It is widely (and not inaccurately) described as “broken.”

But if health economics is where this conversation ends, we have neglected to address an even more fundamental issue, namely, an erosion of a commitment to the sanctity of human life and a relativization of the concept of human dignity. Political and cultural leaders must have a compelling response to the politics of grievance of those who feel that political violence is justified. As the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal observed, “Murder can’t be rationalized, and a society does so at its peril.”

The reason for this prohibition is not just to foster social cohesion and ensure public order and safety. A concern for public order might lead us to worry about the social chaos introduced in a society where vigilante justice was widely tolerated and acted as a parallel system of retribution to the legal system. But this principle does not get to the heart of what is wrong with murder, and it can be challenged by countervailing considerations. “Of course, we don’t want to see the chaos that vigilantism presents,” said Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in an interview following the shooting. She then proceeded to say: “We also don’t want to see the extreme suffering that millions of Americans confront when your life changes overnight from a horrific diagnosis.”

The prohibition of murder in civilized societies, instead, must be grounded in a commitment to the dignity of the human person and the sanctity of human life. That is to say, we believe in the intrinsic value of human life and thus are committed to prohibiting the intentional taking of innocent human life.

If anything, then, we need to return to the classical and Judeo-Christian origins of the legal and ethical principles underpinning our society. We must not lose ourselves in destructive cycles of social media outrage and political resentment. This ethic affirms the value of human life and prevents the authorization of violence in situations of excessive corporate or governmental power. This, rather than a rationalization of political violence, is what we need to hear from politicians on both sides of the aisle.

Some may view the language of the sanctity of life as a purely religious notion or a hangover from Bush-era neoconservatism. They are mistaken. The language of the sanctity of life may have experienced a resurgence during the debates over embryonic stem cell research and cloning during the presidency of George W. Bush. But the sanctity of human life predates this time. Rather, it is a principle that human societies have come to embrace through the light of natural reason, often guided by Christian revelation. As historian Tom Holland notes in Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind, early Christian figures like Gregory of Nyssa helped guide people of his time to see that human life is sacred and worthy of reverence in light of its reflection of God’s nature:

Gregory, more clearly than anyone before him, traced the implications of Christ’s choice to live and die as one of the poor to its logical conclusion. Dignity, which no philosopher had ever taught might be possessed by the stinking, toiling masses, was for all. There was no human existence so wretched, none so despised or vulnerable, that it did not bear witness to the image of God.

Reflections like this led to the conclusion that, in the words of Gregory, “not all the universe would constitute an adequate payment for the soul of a mortal.” The sanctity of life, then, has as its provenance a Christianized Roman culture grappling with the implications of a belief that human beings are made in the image and likeness of God. It does not, however, presuppose Christian belief, and many philosophers argue that it is accessible to human reason alone through practical reflection on the goods of human life. 

The sanctity of life, furthermore, has been the underlying principle in the history of healthcare in the West. Gregory of Nyssa’s brother was St. Basil of Cappadocia, the patron saint of hospital administrators. The first hospitals in the West were started by groups of Christian religious who were acting on Christ’s command to minister to the sick and the needy. St. Basil, for example, started a vast “poor house” or basileias in 370 AD that provided material and spiritual assistance to various classes of people, but particularly the poor and the destitute, including lepers. This has come to be regarded as the first Christian hospital.

The sanctity of human life is, then, a foundational principle not just for human rights but also for healthcare justice—the very aim that Luigi Mangione appears to have been pursuing. Given this, care for the poor and vulnerable, including equitable access to healthcare, must be integrated into a comprehensive vision of human flourishing that is predicated on a commitment to the sacredness of every human life. We will destroy this, however, if we pursue healthcare equity through violent means. What will bring about lasting reform in healthcare is not violent political protest but a revolution at the heart of healthcare whereby we rediscover its connection to the common good and integrate the financial models of our health systems within a broader framework for social flourishing.

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