[Note: this blog is part of a research project. It is not especially aimed at a broad public, though people are of course welcome to read it. Consider everything here a first draft. The words below are not aimed at praising or blaming, but — for now, at least — at understanding.] 

Two vigilantes have made headlines this week. I use the word “vigilante” here in the everyday sense — whether either of the individuals in question fits a narrower, more technical scholarly definition is open to question.

The first of these individuals is Luigi Mangione, who is accused of the shooting of health insurance executive Brian Thompson. The other is Daniel Penny, who killed a homeless man named Jordan Neely on a New York subway (but who was found not-guilty this week by a jury).

Both Mangione and Penny are each liable to be thought of by some as “textbook” vigilantes. Mangione stepped out of the shadows to act in the name of what he likely saw as justice. Penny, in the absence of formal law enforcement, took matters into his own hands to eliminate (what he saw as) a dangerous threat to the people around him.

But vigilantes vary considerably, which makes defining vigilantism difficult. There are solo vigilantes, vigilante duos and groups, and vigilante mobs. Those are importantly different phenomena. There are vigilantes who act in secret, and those who take action in broad daylight. There are people who engage in vigilante-style behaviour, at least, who are somehow connected to their victim, and those who simply punish someone who they see as a threat to the public good, or who is at risk of avoiding or escaping punishment by the formal justice system. There are vigilantes who kill, and vigilantes who take a more measured approach. There are vigilantes who know a lot about their victims, and vigilantes who act quickly on much less information.

Let’s do a little compare-and-contrast of Mangione and Penny. The issues below are all primarily descriptive (i.e., I’m not judging their behaviour, just categorizing it based on public knowledge). But some of what is below will be useful in reaching a moral assessment.

First, let’s touch on the elephants in the room, namely the race and class of the two victims in these cases. Brian Thompson was a white CEO. Jordan Neely was a homeless Black man. These differences likely go a long way in explaining the different public reactions to the two killings — or, should I say, the reactions of different publics. Both killers are white, which is something the two case share in common, but it also means that one case is “the killing of a Black man by a white man.” This, for some people, will harken back to one of the darkest eras of vigilantism in America, namely the Jim Crow era in which groups like the KKK “punished” Black Americans for wrongs that were either entirely imaginary or that only made sense from inside the warped morality of racism. This is not at all to say that the killing of Jordan Neely was racially motivated, but rather to say that — as with the police killing of George Floyd — it’s almost impossible not to see it through the lens of American race relations.

Motivation. We don’t yet really know Mangione’s motivation, but it seems clear that he has a beef with the American healthcare insurance industry, and maybe with UnitedHealth in particular. Whether his beef is personal (did his grandma die because of a denied insurance claim?) or more general or even ideological is unknown (though hints are emerging). When sociologists and other social scientists who study vigilantism talk about motives, they tend to refer broadly to a desire to “enforce social norms,” which allows the “vigilante” category to be very broad indeed. But on that understanding, if we think (as many people do) that American healthcare insurance companies regularly violate basic norms of human decency or respect for human life, then Mangione can be understood as a vigilante of the norm-enforcing type. Other scholars (including me) tend to focus more narrowly on vigilantes punishing law-breakers. On this narrower reading, Mangione doesn’t count as a vigilante (unless Thompson was involved in law-breaking that we don’t know about), but then I don’t have a clear “other” category to put him in.

What about Penny? His case is complicated. For one thing, if we accept the claim that he was acting to neutralize a clear and present threat, then this might not count as vigilantism at all: most cases of self-defence certainly aren’t categorized that way. But then, one of the most famous “vigilante” cases in recent history, namely the “subway vigilante” Bernhard Goetz, was also characterized as self-defence (though whether Goetz’s use of lethal force was justified, in that case, was and is very much open to question.) The fact that Penny apparently saw Neely as a threat means he thought he could reasonably anticipate that Neely was about to engage in violent law-breaking, which he (Penny) then proceeded to prevent.

Secrecy. Here is a key difference between Mangione and Penny. Mangione wore a mask, killed Thompson, and immediately fled the scene. Penny killed (or took actions that resulted in the death of) Neely in front of witnesses. I don’t know of much that has been written that plays up this distinction among styles of vigilantism, but it seems important both descriptively and morally. On the different but related issue of civil disobedience, important writers on the topic have argued that taking action in plain sight and being accountable for your actions is morally important. In Penny’s case, the fact that he didn’t flee might help make more plausible the idea that he at least didn’t believe he was doing anything wrong or unreasonable — that restraining Neely as he did was something that needed to be done.

Insufficiency of alternatives. Finally, one of the characteristics scholars most frequently point to in writing about vigilantes is that the vigilante acts — in the absence of special authorization — in part because he believes that duly-authorized persons (police, prosecutors, etc.) aren’t getting the job done. In some cases, that’s because they think the cops are corrupt or incompetent; in other cases (think Montana, 1880) it’s because there’s literally no sheriff in town to keep the peace. In such cases, it can seem reasonable (or even obligatory) to step up to the task. Penny fits this classic characteristic most obviously: there was no cop present on the subway when Penny showed up and caused a disturbance. Of course, this still leaves open important questions about whether Jordan Neely really posed a sufficient thread that he needed, immediately, to be neutralized. Mangione has less standing as a vigilante, here. There were no apparent exigent circumstances in his case. He may well have been frustrated — as many are — by the ability of certain companies and their CEOs to get away with wrongdoing. But, imperfect as they are, the US (like most other nations) does have processes for dealing with corporate miscreants. And there’s little reason to think that Mangione’s actions will actually end up saving a single life.

*Note this was edited slightly on December 11, 2024. Through sheer oversight, I had originally failed to discuss Mangione in my final paragraph.