To be charitable, other people can have different views on ethics.

For example, if harming a CEO who helped raise claim denial rates from less than 10% to 30% results in revised policies and less overall suffering, that could be morally justifable to some.

Vigilante justice indicates a failure in the system to administer justice.

It is absolutely in society’s interest that someone who has caused deaths and misery of thousands is punished.

What about the cheering on of murder in the street?

Nah, that rich fuck had it coming, shooter is a hero.

We have a president who says that he could do exactly what The Adjuster did, and get away with it. If the president can do it, why not this guy?

I don’t like it, but this is our world right now.

The comment I replied to wasn’t cheering on a murderer.

The comment I replied to was trying to convey that an impoverished person may feel like the reward money for turning in a murderer outweighs any moralizing over the murder itself. That the dollar figure could be literally life changing and they may feel they have no option but to turn them in.

And people downvoted that. Hence my shaken faith in people’s ability to empathize.

I guess people are saying that they believe there is such a thing as an ethical murder in the streets. Of course in any form of ethics vacuum chamber this can’t stand. But in the real world where children are bombed for the sake of some asshole’s religion, where the president boasts he could get away with murder in the street and courts confirm this, in a world where sick people are left to suffer to boost a share price, then, THEN an act like this becomes a reasonable response to an unreasonable world.

Maybe someone better educated can tell me what ethics scholars have to say about how an ethical actor should behave in a system where ethics have utterly broken down. Right now, the crowd is saying “like that guy.”

I’m ill-disposed to wag my finger at them, and think the only ethical course is to address the corrupt environment in which this act occurred, because that environment undermines any one-dimensional ethical evaluation of this murder in the street, and that makes me deeply uncomfortable.