Luigi Mangione
After a powerful, inhumane, and heartless health care CEO was shot and killed in New York City (presumably by Luigi Mangione), the pundit class flooded the zone with sanctimonious pieces scolding the masses for making a hero out of Mangione. I tried to work up some sympathy for the CEO. I failed, because I think there are millions of people — powerless people — more deserving of our sympathy. Does that make me a bad person?
First I should mention that Mangione’s lawyers have released a statement from Mangione thanking people for their support. Obviously he has become a hero for a great many people. Mangione’s legal team also have started a web site so that people can follow the case.
Until a couple of weeks ago, I thought that Jonathan Haidt, with his “moral foundations” theory, held a monopoly on studying how the moral values of liberals differ from the moral values of conservatives. Now I know that Haidt has a competitor. That’s Kurt Gray, at the University of North Carolina. As Gray writes on his web site, “If you want to understand the morals of the ‘other side,’ ask yourself a simple question — what harms do they see?”
I learned of Gray’s existence after a friend in Washington (who knows that I think Haidt is a schmuck who claims to be objective while implicitly flattering the moral crudeness of conservatives) sent me a link to a YouTube video. In the video, Gray is interviewed by Michael Shermer, who founded Skeptic magazine. I have seen Skeptic magazine from time to time over the years, and I always found it to be smug and snarky. Thus I was not surprised to find, in the video, that Shermer comes across like a used-car salesman. If you watch the video, I’d recommend discounting and skipping over Shermer’s jabbering. Only what Gray says matters.
In the video, Gray mentions the Mangione case. Liberals see a great deal of harm in people dying, or being bankrupted by, the greed of a health-care CEO. But liberals (I can testify to the truth of it) aren’t as alarmed by harm to a CEO who is responsible for those deaths and bankruptcies. What can be said about that kind of ethics?
Most people would agree that, if one of the 40 plots to assassinate Hitler had succeeded, then something like 50 million lives would have been saved, not to mention that Hitler was just plain evil. It is no great leap of moral reasoning to hold that the world would have been much better off if Hitler had died sooner rather than later. I think it reasonably follows that there are plenty of other people whom the world would be better off without.
Whether assassination is justified is a separate, and much more difficult, question. Reasonable people would always hope that there are humane and legal ways of preventing bad people from doing harm. Bad people have lately been very successful in finding new ways of preventing us from using humane and legal ways of stopping them from doing harm. Reasonable people also will disagree on when humane and legal solutions have failed, and when, if ever, the harm someone does in the world is so great that that person should be dispatched. Those who support capital punishment have already taken a stand on this question, which, as I see it, puts them on a slippery slope toward hypocrisy, especially if they demand the death penalty for Luigi Mangione, as many of them will.
It all boils down to what Kurt Gray is arguing: Different people assess harm in very different ways. It’s hard for me, as a liberal, to believe, but many people worry much more about harm to the harmful and powerful than they worry about harm to the harmless and powerless. Luigi Mangione has become a hero because he took the opposite — and, I would argue, the less morally crude — position.
Anyway, my intention here is only to bring up different ways of looking at these things. I am not arguing that Luigi Mangione was right to kill Brian Thompson. Certainly I would not have done that. But I also refuse to be scolded by the morally crude people who today are strutting and gloating over having the upper hand and new power to do harm in the world, with impunity. After all, remember who it was who said this and whom he was talking about: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?”
The right-wing propaganda campaign against “wokeness” and diversity, equity, and inclusion is all about the glorification of moral crudeness, because everything they want to do is morally crude. It’s no wonder that they had a fit over Luigi Mangione. Someone actually struck back, and a great many people found it inspiring.
Consider skipping to around 39:00 for what Kurt Gray says about Jonathan Haidt.
I watched a video of a psychiatrist and neuroscientist discussing the Mangione case. He likened Luigi’s decision to assassinate the healthcare CEO to a man at his wit’s end deciding to destroy his world in a sort of standoff with the social contract. The channel on YouTube doesn’t have the video discussing Mangione – it’s on his Patreon, probably so it won’t be flagged. Mangione was from a well-to-do family and was valedictorian, so for him to go through with his decision, which wasn’t a crime of passion or self-defense, he must have decided consciously or not to tear up the social contract. Committing the worse crime possible in a country with death penalty laws. He clearly had come to terms with what he was going to do.
He went more in depth with the responsibility of healthcare companies and their role in the social contract and whether or not healthcare should be a right. Obviously, I think it should be. We have the resources, but our prevailing economic ideology would rather us make stronger guns for geopolitical allies than help ourselves get better.
As far as support for his act goes, I haven’t discussed it with anyone personally. I understand why he did it. I wish it would have had an effect on the healthcare system and not just on healthcare company websites scrubbing images of executives.
Hi Dan: I am hoping that Mangione will write some sort of manifesto. Also, there seems to be a consensus forming among his fans that Dave Franco is just the right person to play him in the movie version. The usual thing with angry young American males is to target innocent people, a totally nihilistic, cruel, and stupid thing to do. Mangione, bless him, at least had a cause, and a very timely and important cause at that.
You’re right about Mangione. Angry white young men usually target vulnerable groups out of some misguided attempt to get a message across that the group they targeted somehow victimized them. At least Luigi targeted someone who undoubtedly has caused harm to society.
The biggest paradox about the situation is the juxtaposition of cleverness and foolishness. Removing all morals from the discussion, and speaking only of tactics… How could one tactically pull off a complicated crime and yet unthinkingly expose themselves in a McDonalds? Also… this was a symbolic murder, and Mangione ought to have considered the symbolism of his every move: starting with how and where he’d get caught. Moving forward, with regard to his public image, he might profit from reading about how John Brown dealt with his death sentence. Brown had so endeared his captors that it seemed they hanged him with regret.
Also, I don’t think I’m nitpicking to ask: why not put some real effort in the manifesto that he wrote?
Lastly, the most level-headed critique of Mangione came from this writer: https://substack.com/home/post/p-153493189
All just food for thought.