Perhaps the universe was sending us all a sign by coupling Daniel Penny’s acquittal and the capture of United Health Care CEO Brian Thompson’s alleged murderer within a short time. Or maybe the rift in moral reasoning that responses to the two events revealed simply opened in early December as never before.
The rift is most clearly expressed in Americans’ shockingly variant answers to fundamental questions that strike at the heart of our shared existence. When is homicide justifiable? What counts as self-defense? What counts as a threat that deserves to be met with violence? How do we determine guilt and innocence–not in the procedural sense of trials and evidence, but in the substantive sense of concluding that certain behaviors amount to punishable conduct?
Without a broad consensus on how to answer these questions, social cooperation is impossible. How can I be sure no one will kill me for idiosyncratic reasons (or no reason at all), confident in being hailed as a hero and, eventually, not prosecuted—all because I have characteristics that the public believe disqualify me from legal protection? Confidence that our law and culture maintain stable conditions under which it is acceptable to engage in violence is prerequisite to everything else we do together. That goes beyond merely disapproving vigilantism and towards moral considerations that lead us to distinguish systematically between vigilante murder and justifiable self-defense.
Continue reading the entire piece here at Fusion
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Tal Fortgang is an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He was a 2023 Sapir Fellow.
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