Violence and legitimacy: The assassination of Brian Thompson

Brian Thompson, a health insurance CEO was shot and killed in New York on the 4th of December. On the bullets, the assassin wrote the words:

Delay, Deny, Defend:

Presumably from the title of the book:

Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don't Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It by Jay Feinman.

Unlike most extralegal killings, this one is popular:

The discussion on the political left is unsurprising, but support for the assassination from the political right is more surprising.

Many are opposed of course, here we see “Alaric The Barbarian” who describes himself as advocating for a “Warrior-poet lifestyle”, complaining about “Leftists” celebrating the death of “A father of two” a frankly pathetic argument, probably given in the place of something better because spelling out his deeper commitments would destroy his cred.

Later Alaric, I think about the same case, wrote:

An important, if rather an obvious point, and not wrong, but very funny coming from a “Warrior-Poet” who gives his location as “Brave New World”

But a lot of people on the right are glad the dude’s dead. Nate Rybner is no leftist- he’s a MAGA supporter, nevertheless, the vote on his Twitter poll was overwhelming.

Here’s my diagnosis The right has expressed a great deal of anti-establishment sentiments. These sentiments are not really compatible with the underlying commitments of the right as a movement, so this event splits between those who connect with the rhetoric and those who connect with the underlying rightwing commitments.

I’m interested in the ethics of celebrating Thompson’s death. I think it’s a subject that’s worthy of serious, mature reflection. Although it is, of course, a morbid question, it is an important one and deserves serious thought.

I think that among the highest truths of things is that nobody deserves to die. To truly believe that is to be on the side of humanity as such- bare humanity. Thus every death, considered in and of itself and without reference to effects on other things, is bad.

But this isn’t quite the same as saying that one should never celebrate death. If a death will save more lives on balance then it might be overall good even while it is, considered purely in itself, bad.

Even in cases where death will not prevent other deaths, there are situations in which it would be gauche to decry celebrations. If Bob the deposed dictator had terrorized a country by killing thousands and thousands in that community and finally died of cancer in prison, then even though strictly speaking it would be best not to celebrate his death, it would be puritanical to tell off the celebrants.

We face two questions:

Was Brian Thompson responsible for deaths?

Will Brian Thompson’s death prevent more deaths?

Resolving the first question is easier, but there is still some complexity. It’s clear, that, in a fairly trivial sense, Thompson caused deaths. He created policies that led to the rejection of claims resulting in deaths at some point. However, this by itself is not sufficient, because he could argue that, if he hadn’t done that, he would have been replaced by someone who would do exactly those things due to the structural incentives of someone in his position.

Suppose there was a saint who became the CEO of a health insurance company. While he took actions that resulted in deaths, he always did so from the point of view of trying to minimize net deaths. He did what he did to avoid being fired, lying to the shareholders that he was trying to maximize shareholder value. That CEO would not be guilty of killing. I doubt though that Thompson reaches that threshold.

To put it a little differently, Thompson is guilty of killing if the following holds:

At some point, Brian Thompson took an action resulting in death he didn’t have to take. An action, not required to hold onto his job, foreseeably likely to result in the death of one person, and motivated by maximizing shareholder value or advancing his material interests.

Unless Thompson was secretly an undercover altruist, lying to shareholders while really trying to save lives, it seems likely this criterion holds. Don’t just think about the commercial decisions of his company here- think also about the political and lobbying decisions.

Will Thompson’s death prevent more deaths? This is a much harder question to answer. What America needs is structural healthcare reform on a scale that seems almost impossible to imagine given its sclerotic institutions. There is a tiny chance this will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back, that healthcare reform will happen, and that but for this action it would not have happened or would have happened later. More likely is that this action will, by focusing attention on healthcare, lead to smaller reforms. Finally, there is the chance that health insurance companies will, take this as a signal of their unpopularity, moderate aspects of their decision-making, lobbying, etc.

The irony is that how we relate to the killing itself affects the likelihood that it will have positive or negative effects. If people decide that it was an outrageous killing etc. etc. and we must avoid thinking about the killer’s beliefs, however reasonable, than the killing could make healthcare worse. If, on the other hand, people decide that this is an outgrowth of a corrupt system that needs to be reformed, then the killing is more likely to be net positive in its effects. See the anti-cult reforms that followed the death of Shinzo Abe.

The idea of legitimacy

To believe in legitimacy is to believe that there is a fundamental moral difference between lawful and unlawful actions in our society. This, I think, is the cause of the real divide on Thompson. Everyone seems to agree that he performed actions that led to death, but were those actions fundamentally different from the action of killing him because they were embedded in a system of law?

I, in my bones, do not recognize legitimacy, I see the banner of law as, of at most, pragmatic interest. Sometimes that pragmatic interest is strong- we should aim to avoid civil war and the idea of legitimacy helps with that. But this is not inherent to legitimacy.

For me, essentially, on the assumption that Brian Thompson denied more care at the margin than was necessary for his company to function and defended the system of private healthcare - what he did was, essentially, exactly the same as breaking into people’s houses and stealing medicine from their medicine cabinet, causing them to die. That is, in turn, more or less equivalent to shooting them to steal their wallets.

Imagine there was a race of Martians who had elaborate rules about the use of objects, the exchange of objects, where one could and could not go etc. Imagine these rules are often bizarre. They specify things like colors, phases of the moon, etc. that make sense in the institutional context of the Martians, but seen from the outside, make little sense.

Further, imagine these rules change in their specifics frequently, and powerful Martians have disproportionate control over this. Grant that this system of rules is better than pure anarchy in the sense of no coordination over what Martians can and can’t do, and the Martians are less likely to go hungry or starve than they would in a state of pure non-coordination. Still, the system has many wrong and arbitrary elements, maintained through essentially self-interested and destructive motives.

I believe that

1. In the Martian system performing a social maneuver that results in the avoidable and foreseeable death of a person for personal gain is murder in a morally exactly similar way to doing so in a way that violates the rules. Indeed, in some ways using the rules to protect such extractive action is worse.

2. Our system is not morally relevantly different from the Martin system. True, if there were literally no rules about who could access what, production would collapse, and that would be bad for everyone- this is also true in the Martin system. But that being under a system isn’t the worst state of affairs possible doesn’t justify things done in that system.

A lot of people have trouble getting their heads around this. It’s hard to look at institutions truly from the outside.

Joseph Hall, at ten years old, shot and killed his abusive father Jeffrey Hall. That his father was abusive is backed up by pretty good evidence- not only the testimony of his family, but the conditions of the home and, frankly, the fact that his father was a Neo-Nazi (I make no apologies for profiling in this regard). He was sentenced to 10 years in juvenile detention by a judge. The act was seemingly discretionary- there are ways the judge could have avoided that sentence, and probably even a guilty verdict.

Now this case is a great way to divide out those who do and don’t believe in the legitimacy assumption. Plenty of people oppose what the judge did, but it is not, in and of itself, the same as rejecting the legitimacy assumption. If you do not hold the legitimacy assumption you will see this as roughly equivalent to the judge personally locking the kid up in his basement for ten years, with the only real morally significant difference being the presence of a cause aimed at the public welfare. Note, though, that this factor is not necessarily terribly significant- if Bob goes out and kills a bunch of people who he thinks are bad for society without proper justification, that is only very marginal exculpatory, the same is true of locking up a 10-year-old for ten years because you think this will help public order. It is very hard to think of the judges and other functionaries like that consistently.

And yet once the law changes, we sometimes gain the power to see the wrongs of the past without the legal veil. We now see the slave owners of the 19th century as little different from kidnappers.

It takes a real effort, I think, to see society as a pattern of actions, as people interacting with chunks of matter, and bracket out the golden threads of property and law. Of course, law, property, etc. may have a legitimating function, but it is worth seeing what the world looks like on the view that there are just interacting people and objects moving through the world, helping, harming, protecting, and killing- one might say, seeing the world like an ethicist from Mars.

Consider the irony here:

The poster is accused of entering a space outside ordinary morality- a space where the ethical rules don’t apply, and only an arbitrary, corporate-constructed set of rules (moderation) apply in their place, their actions orchestrated behind computers and not face-to-face. These accusations are often not wrong, but all these points apply to the healthcare executive! it’s just that the stakes are higher.

There is no legal suspension of ethics.