Was CEO Brian Thompson a killer?

The discourse is becoming hopelessly confused because it's avoiding the obvious question.

Photo by Maxim Hopman on Unsplash

There seems to be a lot of intellectual confusion in the discourse surrounding the killing of CEO Brian Thompson, and from my vantage point it is largely coming from a failure to distinguish legal questions and moral questions. A man named Luigi Mangione is alleged to have done the deed, and his “manifesto” (really just a brief explanation) tells us why. For the sake of argument, let us set aside the “allegedlys” and take as a given that this picture of what happened is generally correct. We now have three distinct questions:

1. Is it legal to take the law in your own hands and kill someone?

2. Is it moral to kill someone in retaliation for deaths or in self-defense?

3. Is CEO Brian Thompson morally culpable for the deaths that result from UnitedHealth denying benefits?

Let’s look at each of them in turn.