A man was killed. That’s the kind of thing people normally get upset about. But not this week. This week, when UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot dead in Manhattan, the internet erupted in cheers.

Many people, including many progressives and liberals, said they would refuse to mourn the UnitedHealthcare executive because of the habitual unfairness of health insurance providers like the one Thompson oversaw.

The backlash against Thompson spread across social media, from TikTok to Twitter, LinkedIn to Bluesky — typically acerbic jokes about the poster’s empathy being out of network or that Thompson’s claim to sympathy had been denied. Some users commented with “deny, delay, depose” — a reference to the three words reportedly inscribed on the gunman’s shell casings, themselves a reference to the well-known insurance system tactic of “deny, delay, defend” when warding off claims from patients.

The online reaction felt uncomfortable to some bystanders given that we’re all supposed to care about human dignity — the idea that every single person has intrinsic and inalienable value. The concept is at the heart of human rights: It’s because every person has value that they have the right to, say, not be murdered.

Yet the people posting vitriolic comments about Thompson feel justified in being smug about the death of this human in particular. That may be understandable, given the millions of Americans who suffered as a result of the industry that he represented. But disregarding human dignity by committing or cheering on an act of violence can’t be the answer. So, what is? Is there a better way to square moral outrage at someone and what they represent, while keeping faith with a belief in their human dignity?

How to think about human dignity

Our greatest philosophers and spiritual thinkers have considered this same dilemma over the course of centuries. We can learn from the insights they surfaced along the way.

The idea of human dignity crystallized in the wake of World War II, when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed in its first article, “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” But the concept goes back much, much further.

It goes back to the Hebrew Bible, which teaches that humankind was created “in the image of God.” Both Judaism and Christianity took this to mean that each person has something of the divine in them. That means they have inherent worth, a fundamental sanctity that should be respected. In other words, the theological doctrine of imago dei, or “image of God,” isn’t just a creation myth, it is the grounds of a moral imperative: You have to treat people as though there’s God in them, because there is.

To get a sense of how this idea played out in the ancient imagination, consider this story. According to the Bible, when Moses was liberating the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, he parted the sea so they could walk through to the other side. Pharaoh and his Egyptian charioteers came chasing after them. But as soon as the Israelites made it safely through, God sent the waves crashing back down, drowning the Egyptians.

The ancient rabbis, embellishing this biblical story, wrote that the angels in heaven started cheering and praising God when they saw the Egyptians drowning. God got angry at the angels and rebuked them: “The work of My hands, the Egyptians, are drowning at sea, and you wish to say songs?”

The story shows the tension between anger at an oppressor and the idea of human dignity — and it comes out on the side of human dignity.

This idea filtered down through Western thought and was amplified in the Enlightenment era. The 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant gave it a secular formulation when he argued that you should never treat a human being as a means to an end; people are ends in themselves. That provided a foundation for human dignity as it came to be codified in the secular human rights movement and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The same core idea arose among Eastern thinkers. Buddhist philosophy, for example, emphasizes that all beings have “Buddha nature,” or the potential to be enlightened. Yes, we sometimes commit harmful actions, but that’s because we’re subject to certain “causes and conditions” — like ignorance and suffering — that keep us trapped in wrong views and habits. This philosophy encourages us to feel compassion for the person who is trapped in suffering and therefore acting unskillfully. It doesn’t mean we have to approve of their actions, but we shouldn’t hate the person or wish them ill even if their actions have harmed us.

When a human being has acted in a way that’s morally repugnant, you can remember that all humans have value and dignity, while also recognizing that sometimes their conditions — the systems they’re embedded in — twist them into morally deformed beings. That is tragic, and we mourn for that. It has tragic consequences for many other people, and we mourn for that, too. And then we turn that mourning into action: action to change the conditions, so that in future, such tragedy won’t occur again.

How to think about the people trolling Brian Thompson

Why has the public response to the killing of Thompson overwhelmingly been derision for the deceased and admiration for the unidentified shooter?

It would be easy to write this trend off as performative callousness or as a sardonic form of social media politicking. And it’s true that there’s an overwhelming tendency across social media for people to respond to juicy political moments with politically edged sound bites and memetic phrases — for example, gags about the hollow refrain of “thoughts and prayers,” or the demonstrative lack of empathy many show whenever a prominent anti-vaxxer dies from Covid or another preventable virus.

Yet there’s more going on here than just knee-jerk trolling, and it’s important to take a step back and think about why frustration is so high. Rather than blaming one another for not responding to news of the shooting in the “right” way, perhaps we should recognize that deficit as a yearning for a society that shows more compassion by default to its most vulnerable members.

On Reddit’s News subreddit, the top thread about the shooting quickly filled with first-hand accounts of people whose claims had been denied by UHC and other insurance providers. “My wife has MS, and we have been fighting with the insurance company for months because they have been denying her medication,” wrote one user. “I don’t condone violence against these CEOs, but I understand it.”

In her newsletter, independent journalist Marisa Kabas posited that the overwhelmingly negative public response to Thompson in the wake of the shooting was more than just performative vitriol. Comparing the reactions to the death of former Secretary of State and accused war criminal Henry Kissinger, she wrote, “[I]t quickly became clear [Thompson] was someone who many Americans considered to have violated the human contract.”

When someone “violates the human contract,” it challenges us to think about how compassion works: Does it flow toward the largest number of people experiencing harm, toward a high-profile individual victim, or is there room in the imagination for both?

Ideally, the answer is both.

But when we see how the world operates, and all the compassion needed and often denied, it’s little wonder we find ourselves at a deficit. In an ever more polarized society of vastly unequal wealth and large pockets of anti-capitalist sentiment, many people are out of patience with being asked to have compassion for those who have shown little for people in their care, for humanity, or for the planet.

CEOs are arguably high on that list. Corporate regulation has been whittled down over the last 40 years, and executives typically face little personal accountability for even their most inhumane decisions. A recent Supreme Court ruling that limits the power of federal agencies to oversee various business sectors has made seeking accountability even harder — and that has vast ramifications for the health care industry in particular.

Health policy outlet KFF concluded that following the SCOTUS decision, there would be even more barriers to “key health care protections such as prescription drug affordability in Medicare, eligibility rules for Medicaid beneficiaries, infectious disease control and public safety standards, as well as consumer protections for those in self-insured private employer-sponsored plans.” In a separate 2023 poll, KFF found that 58 percent of adults had experienced a problem with their health insurance in the last 12 months and that among that number fully half of them had been unable to resolve the issue. Then there are the hardships involved with paying for insurance to begin with.

Of course Thompson and his family deserve our compassion. But the system he was a key part of frequently operated with little compassion for the humans at the other end of his decisions, and the responses that default to jokes about being “out of network” underscore that. UnitedHealthcare routinely brings in revenue of over $100 billion, with a 2025 revenue forecast of more than $450 billion. Of that, Thompson himself may have taken home as much as $10 million a year.

These sums are staggering, and it feels profoundly difficult to reconcile that much money with the many deeply personal social media stories currently making the rounds — stories of denied claims and agonized fights for basic service, including the deployment of an AI-based claims approval system that was wrong up to 90 percent of the time. But it’s also worth noting that Thompson was reportedly aware of the problems in his industry. One employee told the New York Times that Thompson often spoke about the need to change health care in the US.

The humanity we show each other is a complicated thing. It’s possible that when we try to express our need for it — in this case, for other people caught in America’s health care system — we may be getting further away from that same humanity. It’s difficult, after all, to see the efficacy of a memetic response when it comes across as a callous disregard for personal tragedy, as a denial of care for a dead man and his family.

Perhaps what’s required to grapple with this moment is an expansion of compassion rather than a limiting of it. You can have compassion for Brian Thompson and his family, and you can also have compassion for the millions of Americans who suffered as a result of the decisions made by his industry and the company he oversaw.

And then you can refocus on calling for the kind of meaningful systemic reforms that can actually make a difference — before the next viral vigilante prompts another cyclical cultural conversation about who deserves our empathy.