Source: Underthrow
by Max Borders
“If a health insurance company denied [your] dying wife or child needed care, you’d be angry. You might even fantasize about making someone pay. The problem with such fantasies is that the ghost of Immanuel Kant rightly tuts against rage-filled vigilantism. Kant said we must consider our duty to be good, where a good act would be universalizable. Kant also said people, even the most despicable CEOs, are ends in themselves. But Luigi Mangoine considers himself a virtuous utilitarian — or seemed to on social media. Utilitarian ethics holds that the ‘greatest good’ or ‘greatest happiness’ justifies the means — any means. If knocking off a CEO would spark a revolution against Big Health Insurance, making more Americans happy and healthy, those means would be justified. But for most people of conscience, such an ethic is counterintuitive.” (12/11/24)