Luigi Mangione, Due Process, and the Limits of Knowledge

Or the importance of philosophical hermeneutics for our time

As of approximately five hours before I began writing this essay, Luigi Mangione was indicted on charges of murder in the killing of UnitedHealthcare’s former CEO Brian Thompson.¹ Within the American legal system, what this means is that Mangione is suspected of having killed Thompson, and that there exists enough of a reason on account of available evidence to proceed with a trial, the purpose of which is to determine whether, beyond a reasonable doubt, Mangione actually committed the crime of which he has been accused. That is, at this point, none of us, neither those of us who are members of the public nor those who serve in the legal system, know if Mangione is Thompson’s killer; for that we need to deploy tested methods within a controlled environment (the American courtroom) for interpreting the relevant evidence, weighing it, and then determining whether it, in light of everything else we know, should issue in a judgment that Mangione is in fact guilty. Until that point, until such a judgment is reached through the careful deployment of sound method, we cannot claim to know whether Mangione is what he is accused of being: a murderer.

Look at what people are saying on the internet, however—such as here—and you will find that so, so many people have already made up their minds that Mangione is in fact the killer, and that now the only question is whether he was justified in doing what he did or not. That is, many have taken the evidence (or information about the evidence) available to them as straight-forwardly eliciting from them the judgment that Mangione is guilty. In so doing, though, many have failed to exercise a virtue fundamental to the American legal system, and even fundamental to our larger political order, namely, that of epistemic humility. That is, many, so many, have failed to restrain their desire to judge and have, rather, sought to escape from the tension of not knowing and and to leap into affirming that things are as such things have, apparently, been straight-forwardly given. Instead of the tensions native to epistemic humility, many have chosen a simulacrum of knowledge—not true knowledge but the felt appearance of such, founded in a hasty, but communally supported, judgment.

The American justice system, however, does not proceed so straight-forwardly to a judgment of guilt or innocence as many members of the American public have. Rather, it assumes as true the warp and woof of what the field pf inquiry that has come to be known as philosophical hermeneutics, namely, that the relevant givens of experience, the evidence to be considered, does not give of itself its own interpretation, does not present to the court its proper understanding, but rather that evidence must be methodically interpreted in order that its proper meaning for the case at hand be discovered. Within the American legal system, this methodical process of discovery or unearthing of meaning occurs in a controlled, multi-step process. Within our legal system, we first proceed through discovery, where evidence is submitted for consideration in the give-and-take of a case’s hearing before a judge or jury. At this point, the evidence does not have a definite meaning; it is there to be contended with and interpreted by opposing lawyers before a judge and/or jury of the accused’s peers. Then, after initial interpretations of the available evidence and proposed judgments by each side of a court case, defendant prosecutor, both sides, in a back-and-forth, attempt to develop the best and most reasonable interpretations of the evidence at hand they can for their particular side—for or against a judgment of guilt. Finally, after an extended argument capped by closing summative arguments, a jury or judge, based on the rival interpretations of the relevant evidence presented and the reasons for those interpretations given, decides on a verdict, decides whether it has properly, and properly methodically, been shown beyond a reasonable doubt that the accused is guilty as charged. Upon a verdict reached, then, and only then, do those operative within the legal system take themselves as being able to say that someone is guilty or not guilty; and, even then, the process of determining such guilt may not be over, as appeals to higher courts are always possible. Thus, within the America legal system, a judgment of guilt, or knowledge that an accused person is guilty, is only possible after a methodical back-and-forth consideration of the evidence at hand whereby that evidence is interpreted and its meaning is understood; even after the whole process is completed, error, as the possibility of appeal to a higher court indicates, remains possible. After a process that is methodical but not at all straight-forward, the American legal system allows for a verdict of guilty or not guilty, but it acknowledges possible error and fallibility in the process by allowing for appeals of decisions to higher courts; the American court system acknowledges, then, that knowledge is possible in the matters it encompasses but that sound method is required to attain such knowledge—but even that sound method does not preclude error, either because the relevant insights have not yet been had to correct method properly or because of human bias or hastiness.

There is a key lesson we can take from the American legal system and the way it operates, which can serve to temper our hastiness not only to arrive at a judgment of guilt or innocence in Luigi Mangione’s case but in our everyday pursuits of knowledge generally: No evidence by itself, no matter how much of it we have, straightforwardly provides its own interpretation and meaning, nor does it by itself elicit a judgment. Whatever is given in experience, whatever evidence we encounter or think we encounter, needs to be interpreted: it needs to be reflected upon and the insights into its possible meaning or relation to other pieces of evidence need to be tested, tried, weighed—reflected upon carefully and methodically. And once we have done so, our work is not over: we must then determine, in light of our operative questions and from within a sound understanding of the interpretive framework in which we work, what the implications of the evidence at hand, properly interpreted, has for the matter at hand—which is most properly done dialogically, in conversation with others also with a vested interest in discovering what in fact should be affirmed about the matter under consideration. With such a methodical approach to evidence and its meaning, as well as to answering the relevant questions at hand, we can, the existence and operations of our legal system suggest, hope to arrive at true judgments about the things we wish to judge of.

But not infallibly. For we are human, all too human, and we are, singly and communally, prone to error, oversight, overhastiness, and the effects of biases of all sorts—to say nothing of the epistemic and otherwise limitations placed on us by the historical context in which we must live and work. Thus, as the legal system allows—to a point—appeals of court decisions on account of the real possibility of human error in the process of coming to know, so too can we allow ourselves and each other the grace of always being able to revisit past judgments if new evidence arises, if new and better interpretations of already interpreted data present themselves, or if we discover that we were overhasty in our past efforts at interpretations and/or past judgments.

That is, both in face of Luigi Mangione’s case and before all our efforts to know, what the American legal system would teach us is that humility is called. Knowledge of anything takes effort; it is not straightforward, requiring a series of operations that, in many ways, can all go wrong, and it does not matter whether we are engaged in those operations with others. While those we find community with may rush to judgments about this or that, and while joining in with our communities to hastily affirm such judgments may feel satisfying for giving us a sense both of further knowing and of belonging, it is not the true way of knowledge. The true way of knowledge is tortuous, requiring care and the collaboration of careful others with oneself to walk well; and, even then, it can be walked badly, sometimes requiring one to backtrack and start things over again. As with the Mangione case, so too with the life of the mind, now and at all times—whatever the crowd may cry.

1. Header image: Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky, Ships on a Misty Morning (1888)