When Ethics and Moral Values Depend on Which Side You're On, [View all]

Things are pretty much FUBAR, I think.

When one person kills another person by cowardly shooting the other person in the back on a public street, that was once considered to be heinous breach of some universal ethical rule. In my mind, it still is, regardless of who the two people involved are.

Has that changed somehow? Do we now attempt to analyze both people and justify the killing if we agree with the shooter that the dead person was not a good person? I don't think that is a good place to be, frankly.

Now, I don't know Luigi Mangione. I don't know Brian Thompson. I know that one shot the other in the back on the street in New York. By all accounts, the dead man was the head of a health insurance company, which is not a position I would ever accept. Too much responsibility to save money by denying services to sick people. Terrible job. As the CEO of UHC, Thompson probably did not know the name of a single covered person with the insurance the company offers. I'm certain that he feels no guilt when one of UHC's customer dies after being denied coverage for some treatment or other. He had the job he had, which indicates to me that he is almost certainly an uncaring human being who is more interested in money than health care.

As the shooter, Luigi Mangione planned his act of shooting Thompson very carefully. And successfully. He accomplished his goal of killing a man he blamed for harming others. He planned less well to escape being captured after the fact. I don't know if that was intentional or simply bad planning on his part. Now, he is under arrest and will be tried in a New York court for a crime of killing someone intentionally after planning to do so. Very likely, a jury will convict him and send him to prison for a long, long time. He may well have ended his own life as a free person.

What did not change was the health care insurance system in this country. Thompson will be replaced soon with someone else who will lead a company that will, no doubt, deny care for people for whatever reasons they can come up with. All health insurance companies do that.

In the end, we all die. In the end, the fact that Luigi Mangione killed Brian Thompson by shooting him in the back on a street in New York remains. In doing so, he broke any number of very basic legal, moral, and ethical rules. It is all very regrettable, and has led to people taking sides once again over something that should be a matter of common agreement. Apparently, our basic moral and ethical rules no longer hold. Now, it seems to be a matter of whether you agree or disagree with the motives of the person who kills another person.

Ethics and morals, at that level, should not be transactional, I think. We have made them so.

More's the pity.