Gahy humans. Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas and few ideas are more dangerous

than the notion that a targeted assassination or terrorism, public executions and personal

retribution can be permissible in a peaceful society if they achieve greater ends. This is something that seems

to have been baked into so many people's responses to the assassination on December 4th of the

CEO of United Healthcare, one of the biggest private health insurers in the United States,

brazenly on the streets of New York City. The CEO's wife calls it a senseless killing.

But senseless isn't exactly right.

Not if you pay attention to the way that people are reacting,

especially on social media.

There was a lot of consternation and gloating at the same time.

A lot of a sense that this is a moment when

Americans have to reckon with the moral seriousness of what the private health insurance industry

is up to, specifically CEOs like Brian Thompson, who had taken such an aggressive approach

towards maximizing profits and denying claims, deploying even things

like artificial intelligence to identify the most lucrative ways to deny coverage to their

customers. All of the chatter around this had always been qualified with a line like, or almost

always. Assassinations, of of course are terrible and murder

is never justified, but. And that word but has been banging around in my noggin and doing an

enormous amount of work. Why do we feel the need to reflexively invoke the murder is never

justified claim? If we're then going on to say

that the things that this victim did were beyond the pale, I had initially also ruled out any

consideration of the question about whether or not murder could ever be justified.

...