Is it morally justifiable to murder a healthcare CEO?
A reaction to the mass idolization of a murderer
I’ve seen people celebrate the recent murder of a healthcare CEO and idolize his murderer. In their view, the murderer shot the CEO to fight the capitalist healthcare insurance industry that has killed many by refusing coverage to people in need of life-saving medical care. Those in charge aren’t listening, things aren’t changing. The shooter took matters into his own hands. He sacrificed his freedom to raise awareness of institutionalized mass murder and spark systemic change.
People refuse to unequivocally condemn the CEO’s murder because of one or a combination of the following reasons:
The CEO had more blood on his hands than the shooter through his perpetuation of structural murder.
The murder has the potential to save many lives by producing structural change to the healthcare system.
The CEO symbolizes an oppressive healthcare industry that should die.
Why would these reasons partially or fully justify the murder? The moral calculus behind the first two reasons is utilitarian. They compare like quantities to determine moral justifiability.
Reason 1 compares the shooter’s death toll to the CEO’s. This assumes an equivalence between one-on-one murder (the kind the shooter committed) and structural murder (the kind the CEO perpetuated). There must be a moral conversion rate between these types of direct and indirect killings for them to be compared. For example, one direct murder could be the moral equivalent of ten indirect structural killings. Some conversion rate must be set to make the moral calculation comparing the two death tolls possible.
The death toll calculation would also need to account for the CEO’s degree of culpability for each wrongful death resulting from his insurance company’s refusal to cover medically necessary care. Should every single wrongful death be fully attributed to the CEO? Although unlikely, it’s theoretically possible that his employees are lying to him about the rate of these refusals. If he only knew about 50% of the refusals, then is he still morally on the hook for 100% of them? Is he equally responsible for deaths resulting from systems that he inherited from his predecessor vs ones he installed within the company himself? Some rationale for determining the degree of the CEO’s culpability for each death is probably needed before making the utilitarian calculation.
Reason 2 weighs the taking of the CEO’s life against the saving of multiple potential lives. The shooter killed one person, the CEO, but potentially saved multiple people by doing something that could bring about life-saving structural changes to the American healthcare system. This assumes an equivalence and therefore a moral conversion rate between actual and potential lives. The act of murdering one actual person could be morally neutral if it potentially saves ten people, for example.
The probability that each potentially saved life will actually be saved presumably matters here. A murder with a 10% chance of indirectly saving ten people via structural change likely has a different moral value than one with a 90% chance of bringing about the same outcome. A method for determining this probability and how it fits into the equation would likely need to be developed prior to calculating the overall moral justifiability of the murder.
I’ve heard Reason 1 and Reason 2 put together to justify the CEO’s murder. First, the speaker attributes a negative moral value to the murder because murder, in general, is bad. Let’s say -100. (These calculations are not made explicitly, but are implicit within the argument.) This -100 value is offset by the CEO’s death toll (of indirect killings). He’s indirectly killed people, so it’s not as bad that he died. Reason 1 alone could be insufficient to justify the murder. Either way, it supposedly reduces the negative moral value of it. Maybe the CEO’s immorality adds 50 points back and brings the moral score of the murder to -50. The murder is still wrong, but less so because it is of a healthcare CEO. Reason 2 is then asserted. The positive moral value of the potentially saved lives is brought in. Somehow this is calculated by the speaker in a way that brings the total moral score of the murder to a positive value greater than 0. Maybe ten points are added for each hypothetically saved life and the murder potentially saved 100 people by sparking structural change. This brings the total moral score to +950, which means the murder is not only justified but positively good.
Reason 3, the murder is justified because the CEO symbolizes an oppressive healthcare industry that should die, is an unconscious motivation. It explains the immediate schadenfreude many felt when they read the news about the CEO’s murder. Where does the instantaneous sense that he had it coming come from? Symbolic associations produce these spontaneous emotional reactions. In the moment, it doesn’t matter at all whether this previously unknown CEO had any kids or whether he was a courageous firefighter in a past life or if he cared for his elderly in-laws when he wasn’t out building tiny homes for unhoused immigrants fleeing political violence — literally nothing about him as a person mattered in the moment other than that he’s a healthcare CEO. Why? The instant schadenfreude is a reaction to what killing a healthcare CEO symbolizes for people. To many, the murder of a guy named Brian represented revolution against an oppressive capitalist system that puts profit over people.
Personally, I didn’t grieve the CEO. I had never heard of him before his murder and I didn’t know him. The nonchalant murder of a person on a busy street in broad daylight bothered me a bit. Then, I saw posts with thousands of likes explicitly condoning Brian’s murder. These upset me far more than the murder itself because I don’t think that I’m a better person than Brian. Brian didn’t set up the current system. He’s probably not a psychopath intentionally refusing life-saving care. I have no idea what all Brian’s done. Maybe he’s done a ton of great things apart from his CEO job. I have no idea. I do know about what I’ve done in the past. I haven’t ever killed anyone, but neither has Brian — well not really killed — but it’s not like I haven’t done things that I deeply regretted afterward.
It’s not clear to me how I should morally weigh my activity against Brian’s. There a lot of moral conversion rates that I’d have to figure out and honestly I don’t trust myself enough to make those judgments. I’d likely bias the calculations to make myself seem more moral than I actually am — such is the nature of human psychology.
Saying it’s good that Brian was murdered is the same as saying that Brian mattered less as a human being because of what he did. Everyone agrees that, in general, it’s bad to murder people. Brian’s sins supposedly made his murder an exception to the rule. If the way that I’ve lived my life is the same or worse than Brian’s, then I matter less as a human being too — maybe even less than Brian.
If you think that it’s good that Brian was murdered, then I’d like to know specifically how you made that moral calculation. I’m interested in your moral conversion rates because they supposedly compute my existential worth as a person. How many indirect killings are equivalent to one direct murder? How many potential people must the murder of an actual person be predicted to save to make it justifiable? How did you determine these moral conversion rates? Does the probability that each potentially saved life will actually be saved matter? How did you calculate those actual probabilities in Brian’s case? What’s the minimum probability of potential salvation required for Brian’s murder to be morally justified?
The utilitarian moral calculus applies to itself. The perspective that the value of an individual’s life can be quantified is comparable to the perspective that the value of an individual’s life is unquantifiable. These opposing perspectives can be operationalized as historical death tolls. Which fundamental perspective on the value of human life has killed more people throughout history?