The tragically mistaken idea of someone killing another human being can be justified based on their own private rational and personal experience has surfaced once again in the storm stream of the internet. It appears the CEO of Unitedhealth may have been selected as a symbol to die in the name of a broken health care system by his assassin. Does any human being ever have the legal or moral right to take the ‘one-life’ of another human being based on his or her own private rational or painful personal experience? We are not talking about self defense here, which is a conversation with a whole other set of caveats, but rather we are talking about a mortal decision. 

The following is a quote from guest editorial appeared in the New York Times article writing partially in response to the murder of the insurance CEO. The article was titled: Not Everything Understandable Is Justifiable by Travis N. Rieder. Dr.Rieder is a bioethicist and the author of ‘Catastrophe Ethics: How to Choose Well in a World of Tough Choices’. The following is a quote from his article.

“A killing can be simultaneously wrong and understandable; but by noting some sympathy or shared rage, one should not for a moment think that I have undermined the case for deep moral concern that a person was killed. Many things can be true at once, and we must be capable of holding them all in our heads at the same time.”

To discuss the ethics and morality of killing may be dangerous in a treatment of a few short paragraphs. While this writer doesn’t necessarily agree with the state’s public authority to take a life inside a man-made system of justice, the taking of a life has been restricted to the public rationale and execution of justice. Recent social media implications that a private individual could be heroically justified in taking a life based on private and symbolic grounds is not just a slippery slope, but frankly strikes this project as a catastrophic fall from grace carrying within it the promise of more blood and chaos. This writer has spoken with police officers and veterans whose taking of a life was protected in their public role, but are still privately haunted after years by the unimaginable finality of the singular action. 

The sense of private good talked about in this decision model is deeply subjective. The private decision leading to retribution if taken at all, must always be taken to the next discernment levels which is community and then the public. Death releases a tsunami wave of painful consequences that can never end on this earth because the consequence of death has no reverse. Most likely the community and not the death penalty most effectively can put the brakes on a decision of mortal intent. The healthcare protester might have sympathetic elements built into his private rationale, but the perpetrator is almost certainly another victim, not of a healthcare system that certainly has deep problems, or the the poor man and his family structure just murdered, but of a culture that teaches child’s play hero games at the stage of life when adulthood should have taken hold. Death is no game. It is time for this country’s culture to grow to maturity before more people die.