When Luigi Mangione killed the CEO of United Healthcare, Brian Thompson, on Dec. 4 in Manhattan, many began to rejoice. It was a reckoning for the top of the medical insurance industry, with other executives being put on notice by many individuals across the country. It was implied the treatment of medical insurance companies was casus belli – a justification for us to use violence on these executives. It is not. Let me explain why.
In my ethics class, we were introduced to the principle of universality or universalization. In most contexts, the meaning is simple: something moral or amoral for one person is also moral or amoral for another. Double standards cannot exist. This seems intuitive, provided you are not drowning in some deep-seated religious dogma that implies I am going to hell because I am not [insert religion here], but my class framed the principle in a new way.
My professor – the commanding officer of the USS Cole when it was attacked in 2000 – posited it this way: if an action is truly moral, then everyone should be able to do it without society losing part of its functionality.
In the framework of American society, could all of us kill executives, politicians and bosses whenever we felt they had committed an egregious wrong that warranted killing? Probably not. Any politician involved in sending us to Iraq would probably be dead, and we would be left without a functioning government. That is not to mention that an “egregious wrong” is very subjective, so people would be killed over significantly less obvious things. Thus, killing powerful people over perceived wrongs is immoral because it cannot be universalized.
However, let us apply the principle of universality in a different context. Could medical insurance companies always prioritize profit over life while society still functions? Some may argue yes on technical grounds since people die all the time, so some more would not break society’s functioning. However, since I believe the protection of life is a core – no, the core – responsibility of society, I would argue it defeats society’s purpose. Therefore, since prioritizing profit over life cannot be universalized, it is immoral.
Thus, to the unfamiliar, we have a dilemma. Medical insurance companies’ practices can be immoral, but Mr. Mangione’s solution was also immoral. However, the solution is simple, albeit admittedly irritating to some, and exasperating to those suffering from denied claims or coverage. It’s also the solution I have advocated for in many previous columns: activism.
Since we cannot sustainably, morally, simply kill people in the hopes it will fix the corporations they represent, we must use the method that has occasionally been proven to work. The irritating part is people have been advocating for universal coverage for decades and no action has been taken, so why would anything change?
I remain optimistic things will change simply because they must. I do believe it will happen in my lifetime. Odds are we will lose people in the meantime due to denied claims or coverage. I do not want to pretend that is a loss I can stomach. However, the alternative is we live in a society where people view assassination as a viable means of political recourse. As mentioned earlier, that is not universalizable. Just because assassinations will likely never be actually universalized does not mean an assassination like this should be tolerated.
However, the idea that people should simply not be left to die because of weird specifics of their required treatment is a salient one, and one I believe will at some point outpace the idea that the government is a bureaucratic, inefficient mess that will cost us more money than the private sector would. The latter idea may very well be true, but it means nothing compared to the idea of people continuing to die preventable deaths.
Janagan Ramanathan is a Sartell High School alum, former U.S. Naval Academy midshipman and current aerospace engineering major at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.
