When moral judgment fails

The nation breathed a sigh of relief days ago when Luigi Mangione was arrested for the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Understandably, the carefully planned killing of a top business executive on a Manhattan sidewalk stunned the nation, and interest in the search for the criminal only intensified over the following days. Mangione will soon face a murder charge in New York City.

But the arrest of the suspected murderer, caught in possession of the murder weapon as well as a written manifesto, also led to very troubling messages communicated throughout the culture. An astounding number of people made light of the murder on social media, while others went even further, justifying the murder in the name of justice for those who see themselves as harmed by the private medical insurance business. Thompson was on his way to a meeting with investors when the crime took place. Several figures in politics and the media argued that, while the murder of an insurance executive who was a father of two children was wrong, the palpable anger against the medical insurance business was understandable.

Liberal politicians like Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., registered their own outrage against the insurance industry and, in the case of Ocasio-Cortez, went so far as to argue the insurance industry is guilty of its own “violence.”

This is not the time to argue in defense of the medical insurance business, but in recent days, a major survey indicated that the vast majority of Americans say they are happy with their current insurance carrier. Those on the political left who argue for socialized medicine and a purely government-run healthcare system frequently misrepresent the problem. The problem is not that an insurance carrier ever says no to some procedures and costs. That’s going to happen in any system. Yes, insurance executives make a lot of money—but so do executives in any major business. Yes, investors expect a return on their investment—but that’s how a healthy economy works, and those major investors include teacher pension funds that pay for both income and medical coverage for retirees. The system sometimes gets things horribly wrong, but do you really expect a government bureaucracy to be kinder and more generous?

Writing in The New York Times, Johns Hopkins University bioethicist Travis N. Rieder argued that Thompson’s murder was “understandable” but not “justifiable”: “A killing can be simultaneously wrong and understandable; but by noting some sympathy or shared rage, one should not for a moment think that I have undermined the case for deep moral concern that a person was killed. Many things can be true at once, and we must be capable of holding them all in our heads at the same time.”

Wow. That’s a less-than-adequate statement of moral judgment. Rieder is clear that he thinks murder is morally wrong, but his argument is less emphatic than we should expect—from a bioethicist, no less.

Rieder is the author of Catastrophe Ethics: How to Choose Well in a World of Tough Choices. He argues that modern people, faced with the very real danger of global catastrophe, are confronted with the fact that their individual choices have little effect, one way or the other. The catastrophic reality is huge, and our moral lives are small. Rieder calls this “The Puzzle.” He considers many angles and arguments, including a discussion of whether it is ethical to eat meat or bring a child into the world.

But the most interesting aspect of the book is what it tells us about Rieder’s own beliefs and worldview. Raised in a Methodist home and taken to church, he began to reject Christianity in his high school years. “I wasn’t sure there was anything like a personal God to be concerned about, and I was becoming more confident in my own judgments about the world than I was in those being taught by religious authority—especially when it came to ethics.” Then he writes this: “If Christianity really did condemn homosexuality, then so much the worse for Christianity. I’m far more confident in my own judgment that there’s nothing wrong with homosexual sex than I am that there exists a personal God who has judged it immoral.”

I think that method of moral reasoning reveals why Rieder’s judgment against the murder of a human being is less than thunderous. He trusts his own moral judgment above all, and his moral judgment is … complicated. A truly clear-headed approach to murder requires a straightforward command against murder, and that commandment must come with nothing less than divine authority. It must be grounded in the truth that human beings are made in God’s image, and it must be understood in light of a divine judgment sure to come.

Without God, morality is just one giant puzzle. If we trust in our own moral judgment—which we know to be merely our own moral judgment—our judgments are going to fail, and we sense it. Sometimes that failure shows up in a brazen murder on the streets of New York City. Sometimes it shows up in the pages of The New York Times. Our task is to see things for what they are.