wonderfully thoughtful xmas present. Gracias

Have a great xmas
be well and have a good one

have brought my attention to a piece likening Luigi Mangione to the villains in Fyodor Dostoevsky's novels.

Moral Permission to Murder

Dostoevsky and the assassination of Brian Thompson

Below is my critique of this piece.

So, first off, what qualifies Mangione as an "assassin" in the eyes of the authors of "Moral Permission to Murder"? America endures mass shootings nearly every day. Do all of the shooters who succeed in killing their victims qualify as "assassins"?

Most of the authors' case rests on a comparison between Luigi Mangione and Raskolnikov, one of Dostoevsky's villains. Here is the main substance of it:

Like Mangione, Raskolnikov was an apprentice intellectual. Shortly before committing the murder of the “awful old harpy” Alyona Ivanovna, he wrote a law-review article titled “On Crime,” in which he argued that “extraordinary people” have the right to transgress traditional morality in pursuit of their ideals. As he explained during his police interrogation: “the ‘extraordinary man’ has the right … to permit his conscience ... to overstep ... certain obstacles, but only in the event that the fulfilment of his ideas (which may sometimes be salutary for all mankind) requires it.”

But, of course, when you have insurance companies denying claims right and left, "traditional morality" might suggest affordable health care for all. In such cases, and there are doubtless thousands of them every year, the "extraordinary people" doing the transgressing are nice CEOs of insurance companies, like Brian Thompson.

To extend the analogy of "Moral Permission to Murder" any further, the authors are implicitly equating Brian Thompson, who was supposedly murdered by Luigi Manzione, with Alyona Ivanovna, the elderly pawnbroker murdered by Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky's novel "Crime and Punishment." But Thompson is far, far worse than Ivanovna.

The authors of "Moral Permission to Murder" continue:

Another of Dostoevsky’s great novels, Demons, parodies a revolutionary theorist who “demands more than one hundred million heads for the establishment of common sense in Europe.” Readers might have laughed in 1871, when the book was first published, but they weren’t laughing by 1937. Once the sort of revolutionaries satirised by Dostoevsky seized power in Russia, some of his work was banned, and then they set about killing each other, just as his banned work had predicted.

But in inter-war Russia they weren't, exactly, "killing each other." Stalin, whom they elevated to power, had them killed. And Stalin, you see, was no special, revolutionary murderer, but rather an ordinary, state-sanctioned murderer.

The authors of "Moral Permission to Murder" continue by explaining how the notion of murdering one person to save many people appears as an outcome of utilitarian philosophy. They conclude by arguing:

Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, this quantification of human happiness led to Malthusian attempts to reduce population, often rationalised by eugenics. It retains its revolutionary influence today among radicals on both the political Left and Right, and it translates the fictional act of Raskolnikov into the actual terrorism of Mangione. It appears, to those who espouse it and their admirers, as a liberating, revolutionary creed.

But Raskolnikov loses his reason the moment he commits murder. His conscience sinks its fangs into his psyche, and over the rest of the novel he is gradually consumed by feverish remorse. His intolerable guilt produces violent rages in response to the teasing, prodding inquiries of the ingenious Porfiry. Something similar already seems to be happening to Mangione. His angry and incoherent courtroom outbursts distort his once-delicate face into that of a raging primate. During his own penal servitude in Siberia, claimed Dostoevsky, he was always able to tell the murderers at a glance.

I wonder what Dostoevsky, in penal servitude in Siberia, would have thought of Joe Biden or Benjamin Netanyahu or (for that matter) any of the other national leaders or health insurance CEOs who hide their murders behind alibis like "war" or "profit" or "they do it too." Being moral (and writing a cool novel about some guy who murdered a pawnbroker with an axe) is one thing. Being moral while starting from the presumption of universal guilt backed up by state-sanctioned impunity is another, more difficult, thing.