I was recently disappointed to see how many of my comrades on the left celebrated, indeed expressed much joy, at the murder of the CEO of a health insurance firm in the United States. I was even more disturbed to find many sexualising the accused murderer. These are things I admit that I find disappointing, horrific, and frankly shocking.
 
While I sympathise greatly with a broader desire to punish those who actively oppress the working class and the impoverished, as a pacifist, I have never, and would never, advocate for violence against anyone. 

This includes powerful oppressive figures, unless it was precipitated by a preceding violent act against an individual or group, where shooting that figure was a clear act of self-defence in the face of an immediate, direct, and clear physical threat. I worded that carefully because I’m aware that the word “violence” has been subject to what some academics call “concept creep” where the social meaning of words expands and changes over time. These days, ‘violence’ occasionally refers to acts that do not involve physical action. Although I’m reluctant to get on board with the emerging expansion of this term, I wish to make it clear that I am referring to defence against physical acts designed to harm, injure, or kill another person in the immediate short term. This was not self defence against that kind of threat.
 
Regardless, as a pacifist, I believe that all actual persons have a right to life. Again, I’m being careful with my wording because I distinguish between ‘actualised’ and ‘potential’ persons, lest my argument be invoked to either assume my position on abortion or to bolster the arguments of so called ‘prolife’ individuals on that topic. I will elaborate and justify that distinction at another time. But by ‘actual’ or ‘actualised’ persons, I am referring to all human persons who have been born.
 
With that cleared up, I believe that nobody has the right, nor the authority, to take the life of an actual person. 
 
Everyone has a right to life. Even the oppressors, the murderers, the rapists, the dictators, the politicians, the CEOs, even the cretins who use their phones in the cinema.

Unsurprisingly then, I believe in the sanctity of the life of actual human persons.

Not just human persons, of course, I’m the kind of person who will move the shower head away from a spider lurking in the bathroom to ensure it doesn’t drown. But the issue of ‘pest control’ is beyond the scope of this reflection so I shan’t pursue it further here.

But I mean to insist that I believe the life of all actual human persons is sacred, and this belief is a foundation of my own personal ethical doctrine.

Further, I do not believe that anyone has the authority to take a life.

Certainly, no person has the authority to decide who lives or dies, and I think those who celebrate the murder of a CEO would have a difficult time justifying why the accused murderer had the authority to actively take the life of that person.
I note this wording is again carefully crafted to avoid addressing the issue of what basis governmental authorities, or perhaps even individual persons, may decide whether to abstain from intervening in the life of another, such as deciding how to allocate healthcare resources. This issue too is beyond the scope of the current reflection.

I mean simply to challenge those who think this murder is morally just to come up with an argument that gives a lone vigilante the authority to terminate the life of someone who, undoubtedly, is a symbolic representation of the horrific and inhumane inadequacies of the United States healthcare system.
The challenge is to come up with an argument that does not also justify the murder of those they may like and praise as heroes and role models by vigilante assassins seemingly motivated by a desire to remove people from society who they similarly believe are harmful to it.
 
Regardless, the absence of any authority in determining who lives and dies is the first pillar on which my claim that the life human persons is sacred rests.

I make this point because many of the arguments I have seen thus far could also be used to murder those who we on the left admire and respect greatly.

However, it's difficult to further justify the sanctity of human life that doesn’t insist this statement is an intuitive, spiritual, or self-evident truth. I have little time for claims made on these bases, and I shan’t expect my readership to blindly accept this either.

My second pillar may initially appear somewhat fallacious as an appeal to emotion or even the naturalistic fallacy. And that is because this claim is rooted in the social nature of humans and the social cognition that comes with it.

Humans are social creatures – we live in communities and rely on each other to survive. This is a simple scientific fact.

Part of living in a society, particularly societies as complex and advanced as our own, requires us to establish a set of rules about how to engage with, cooperate, and help each other, and how to resolve conflict.

You can see why this may attract the charge of the naturalistic fallacy. However, I shall elaborate in the hopes that it dissolves such an accusation.

Given our need for each other to exist, survive, and indeed flourish as individuals, this entails a need for mutual protection. We cannot rely on one another to live in the world if we seek to murder each other to settle conflicts. This, I believe, is the second pillar where the sanctity of the life of human persons is founded.

While I am by no means a Hobbes fanboy, I must credit him with popularising the concept of ‘enlightened self-interest’ as a motive for maintaining the mutual cooperation and respect we engage in within our societies, which is essentially what I’m invoking here. Indeed, Hobbes may argue that justifying vigilante murder risks endorsing a route for humanity that returns us back to the brutal life of pre-society he so vividly described.

To elaborate, if we decided that an acceptable means of resolving conflict was the outright murder of those who are believed to act against the interests of a sizeable portion of our community, indeed a majority, without proceeding down a well-established route of putting that person on trial for crimes against the community, which itself involves a detailed investigation into the nature of those sins, we forego much of the latter in favour of vigilante justice against anyone who any person may perceive as acting against the interests of the collective.

This sounds somewhat Kantian I know, but my point is that we already have rules and procedures in place for handling matters concerning harm against others and the community.

And, returning to my previous point about challenging those who wish to justify this murder, this is one of the first hurdles such an argument would face.

If we think the scope of those rules needs to be expanded to encompass new or previously unaddressed manifestations of harm, we must appeal to the very representatives we elect to power so they may advocate for the changes that are needed.

Thus, setting a precedent of justifying vigilante justice is extremely dangerous.

I imagine my comrades may believe that justice has been served by the murder of this individual. 

However, invoking my previous point that these arguments may be used more broadly, it is not unreasonable to expect that any individual who perceives injustice to have occurred at the hands of another person, then seeks to murder them, would justify their acts on this same basis. 

Indeed, this is the motive of many famous assassins and terrorists of the past. They believed they were doing the right thing by either triggering a revolution or a war, sending a political message, or by ultimately ‘fixing’ society. 

Thus, I stand by my claim that celebrating and justifying the murder of a CEO sets a dangerous precedent. And I welcome any counterargument that demonstrates why this is not the case. 

I also conclude that it violates the sanctity of the life of persons, a status that obtains its justification by the simple facts that nobody has the authority to decide who lives or dies, and that we need each other to survive where means of settling conflicts and disputes must follow the procedures of conflict resolution that have thus far allowed the human race to continue existing without destroying each other. We have the faculties of social cognition - faculties that account for the unusually large brain we have as a species - I suggest we make good use of them.

In that vein I insist that such joyous yahooing over the murder of a person betrays a lack of empathy.

Empathy was, I thought (perhaps mistakenly), a defining feature of leftism.

Empathy can be defined in two ways, as the brilliant book (“Against Empathy”) by Paul Bloom highlighted.

There is affective or intuitive empathy, which is when we feel some approximation to the emotion experienced by someone we care about or relate to, especially when that person has been suffering.

Then there is cognitive empathy, which is also called ‘perspective taking’, which is where we consciously and deliberately imagine what it is like to be another person.

Bloom illustrates that affective empathy can never be a guide to defining a ‘morally correct’ act because it’s very arbitrary in its elicitation.

Sometimes we feel for someone, sometimes we don’t, and sometimes we feel for one party in a conflict and not the other. That precipitates a bias in favour of one person or group over another.

So, using that as a guide to moral behaviour is unreliable as we risk relegating a person or group to the status of ‘other’, where they are seen as less than human and are thus undeserving of the rights and protections of human persons.

This biased nature of our empathic concern is often exploited by those who wish to win over the masses in a conflict with another group – portraying the ‘others’ as less than human so we do not ‘feel’ for them. One only needs to peruse propaganda material by those involved in violent conflicts who portray ‘the other side’ as inhuman animals, as a means of justifying their slaughter.
 
Which leaves us with cognitive empathy as a more reliable guide to moral action.
 
Consciously trying to understand where other people are coming from, what they might have thought and felt, and why they did what they did, is, I thought, a defining feature of the left.

Clearly not.

Indeed, a recent study has shown that those on the far left who advocate violence display elevated levels of narcissism and, more importantly, psychopathy.

Psychopathy is the absence of intuitive concern for others – such as affective empathy. It could be argued that affective empathy, even in the smallest amount, is an important catalyst for engaging the more effortful process of cognitive empathy. If nothing else, ‘feeling’ for someone seems like one possible source of motivation for engaging in perspective taking.
 
Regardless, it is alarming to me that there are many who reside within my ideological neighbourhood who seem to have lower levels of empathy than I thought, or perhaps feel nothing at all for the ‘others’.

Feeling nothing for the ‘other’ and refusing to engage in any form of perspective taking on their part is not something I can endorse or relate to on any level.
 
My principles and values are universal, applying to all persons.
 
My understanding of what it means to be a leftist, even though the term has undergone a massive revision in the past decade or so by being transformed from an economic definition to a moral or social one, is that those of us on the left are all about the rights, wellbeing, dignity, and flourishing of all persons – not just the wealthy and elite that we often accuse those on the right of the political spectrum to be reserving their scope of concern for. We had a vision of the economy and of society that we believe is most conducive to achieving such a fair, equitable society.
 
In that vein, we were supposed to be a group who passionately advocated for the rights and considerations of everyone. Including, and especially, those who are marginalised, demonised, oppressed, and suppressed by society.

Yet this was never an exclusive or exhaustive list.

I thought we abhorred and condemned the suffering of anyone and everyone – especially when that harm was seen as collateral damage in the pursuit of greater ideological and geo-political aims. It seems I was mistaken.

I thought we strived to understand the position of all folks in society, as a means of justifying our goal of social justice by urging those on the opposite side of the political aisle to exercise some empathy. Again, it seems I was mistaken.

Although, it’s rapidly becoming apparent that the left has left me, I still consider myself a leftist. One who advocates for the rights and interests of all persons. One who believes that the role of government is to protect the most vulnerable in society while ensuring the economy benefits everyone. One who empathises with everyone, including those who may hinder or sabotage my view of what a good society is.

But most importantly, one who believes in the sanctity of the life of actual persons and that nobody has the right to take that life away – no matter who they may be.

11 December 2024