An intelligent, attractive former student commits a ghastly murder, reasoning that he is doing society a favor by ridding the world of a greedy capitalist. He is eventually taken into custody by authorities, jailed, and tried.
This scenario does not describe Luigi Mangione, the affluent 28-year-old who recently admitted to killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in 2024 in an apparent message to the health-insurance industry.
The tale is far older: it describes Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s nineteenth-century masterpiece Crime and Punishment.
Nearly a century and a half before Mangione was born, the Russian author explored the notion of murder as a social good. A careful look at the celebrated work reveals Dostoevsky’s antihero is driven by many of the same forces as Mangione: resentment, a sense of entitlement, and dubious ethics.
Murder as a Social Good?
When Crime and Punishment begins, Raskolnikov is miserable. A former law student with grand ambition, he is living in squalor in St. Petersburg, where he drinks heavily and cavorts with unseemly elements. His life is claustrophobic and aimless. Each morning he wakes feeling more “bilious, irritable, and angry” than the last. In his tiny closet-like room, which he looks upon “with hatred,” Raskolnikov resembles a nineteenth-century version of Travis Bickle, the alienated loner depicted by Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver.
Despite his poverty, Raskolnikov sees himself destined for greatness. He views humanity divided into classes—lice and supermen (à la Napoleon and Isaac Newton)—and there’s little doubt about which category he sees himself in. “Existence alone had never been enough for [Raskolnikov]; he had always wanted more,” the narrator tells us. “Perhaps it was only from the force of his desires that he had regarded himself as a man to whom more was permitted than to others.”
Because he sees himself as extraordinary, Raskolnikov doesn’t believe he is bound by traditional moral law. Yet despite his impressive education and sense of greatness, Raskolnikov can’t even afford to pay rent. Meanwhile, Alyona Ivanovna, a pawnbroker in his neighborhood to whom he is indebted, has amassed real capital.
Disgusted that he’s forced to grovel to this “useless” trader who, in his mind, is taking advantage of the poor, Raskolnikov undertakes a social experiment: he kills Alyona Ivanovna with an axe, reasoning that the heinous act will free him from his impoverished condition, allowing him to improve the world.
For One Life, Thousands Saved
Brian Thompson was not murdered with an axe. The married father of two was shot outside a Hilton Hotel in Manhattan, an event captured on camera. Video footage showed a man in a hood wearing a backpack walk behind Thompson—CEO of the health-insurance business of UnitedHealth Group, the fourth-largest company in the world—level a pistol and fire three shots.
Mangione was captured five days later at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania. Following his arrest, he was widely celebrated as a hero, an event the Associated Press described as “an unusual American moment.”
Many were shocked that so many could view murder as a means of achieving social change, but Dostoevsky would have been less surprised. His antihero is remarkably similar to Mangione, who is scheduled to be sentenced in December for Thompson’s death.
Like Raskolnikov, Mangione is a highly intelligent, well-educated former student. He was valedictorian of the Gilman School, an elite private school ($35,000 a year) in Baltimore. He earned a pair of degrees from Penn—a BA in computer engineering and an advanced degree in information science—where he graduated cum laude. Mangione, too, is in his twenties and experienced a profound sense of alienation. The similarities run deeper, however.
Humans should resist the impulse to believe they possess sufficient wisdom and moral authority to decide which lives are expendable in pursuit of the world they dream of creating.
While Mangione has been relatively silent since his 2024 arrest—a credit to his lawyers, since he still faces state murder charges—his diary offers a rare look into the mind of a killer. Like Raskolnikov, Mangione had convinced himself through cold reason that the murder he was set to carry out was just.
“I finally feel confident about what I will do,” Mangione wrote in one entry. “The details are coming together. And I don’t feel any doubt about whether it’s right/justified.”
Raskolnikov arrived at his decision to kill with similar reasoning. Moments before he takes an axe to Alyona Ivanovna’s skull, he listens to a student casually discuss the possibility of slaying an old woman so that her estate could serve humanity instead of being wasted as a bequest to a monastery.
Hundreds, thousands perhaps, might be set on the right path; dozens of families saved from destitution, from ruin, from vice, from the venereal hospitals—all on her money. Kill her, take her money and with the help of it devote oneself to the service of humanity and the good of all. What do you think, would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds?
Half-Baked Ideas in the Air
These murders are not identical. Mangione’s murder had specific political motivations, while Raskolnikov’s did not—but they are alike in a key way: both killers see utility in the murder they commit.
That Mangione was targeting the healthcare system, which he saw as cruel and unjust, is well known. What’s less well known is that Thompson was not his initial target. In court filings, federal prosecutors noted that a person with the initials KMD was initially considered but rejected because Mangione reasoned that killing him “would do nothing to spread awareness/improve people’s lives.”
In other words, Mangione, like Raskolnikov, had convinced himself he was committing murder for humanitarian reasons. Yet Raskolnikov eventually sees this self-deception for what it was: a nihilistic impulse to prove to himself that he was “extraordinary” and not bound by the same moral constraints as other men. Self-deception of this kind runs through the heart of several of Dostoevsky’s novels, including The Brothers Karamazov. But Dostoevsky’s novels tended to be inspired by real people and real ideas, and Crime and Punishment is no exception.
An 1865 letter reveals the book’s central plot was inspired by the intellectual movement of his day. In a pitch to The Russian Herald, Dostoevsky called his work-in-progress “a psychological account of a crime” involving a “young man, sent down from university, of middle-class origins and living in extreme poverty.” The young man “decides to kill a certain old woman … who lends money on interest” after “having come under the influence of some of those strange, ‘half-baked’ ideas that are in the air.”
We see the “half-baked” notions through the eyes of Raskolnikov, a youth radicalized by a medley of intellectual currents fashionable at the time: socialism, atheism, utilitarianism, materialism, and nihilism.
A devout Christian, Dostoevsky saw danger lurking in these ideas, which were very much indeed “in the air” at the time. St. Petersburg, the setting of the novel, was at the forefront of this intellectual movement, and it had gained momentum following the liberal reforms of Alexander II, who became tsar in 1855. Dostoevsky, who had narrowly escaped death by firing squad for publishing “illicit” materials during the reign of Alexander’s father, welcomed these liberal reforms. Yet he diverged from political and literary radicals of the day—such as Ivan Turgenev, the Russian writer credited with depicting “the first Bolshevik” in his dark 1862 work Fathers and Children—who sought liberation not only from political oppression but from all moral constraints.
Mangione was fueled by his own “half-baked ideas”—anti-corporatism, effective altruism and Zizian-inspired Rationalism—and appears to have fallen prey to a similar form of self-deception, convincing himself that murder was justified because it would serve some greater good.
Startlingly Modern and Distressingly Familiar
Dostoevsky is remembered as a literary pioneer because he explored depths of the human psyche like few authors before or since. But it was his understanding of ethics and philosophy that made him a prophet.
Writing a century after Dostoevsky’s death, the British literary scholar W. J. Leatherbarrow noted the “startingly modern and by now distressingly familiar” paradigm of Raskolnikov, “the murderer/intellectual prepared to sacrifice fellow human beings on the altars of theoretical premises.”
In a 1992 introduction to Crime and Punishment, Leatherbarrow explained that Raskolnikov’s crime followed logically from the rational utilitarianism popular in intellectual circles at the time. That Americans increasingly see utility in violence suggests this way of thinking may be gaining momentum, despite its faults. Fortunately, the novel offers a better moral vision in the end.
After murdering the pawnbroker, Raskolnikov is tormented by the unnatural act. He ultimately confesses to the crime and is sentenced to exile in Siberia. Through his physical and psychological suffering, he experiences a spiritual catharsis. It is brought about not through intellectual understanding but through repentance, love, and a gift from Sonya: a copy of the New Testament and its promise of forgiveness and salvation.
Whether Mangione will undergo such a transformation is unknown. But Dostoevsky’s warning remains relevant and clear. Humans should resist the impulse to believe they possess sufficient wisdom and moral authority to decide which lives are expendable in pursuit of the world they dream of creating.
Raskolnikov ultimately learns that no intellectual theory can make murder moral, a truth Dostoevsky’s intellectual successors, the Bolsheviks, would fail to learn, to disastrous results.
Let’s hope Americans do not repeat the mistake.
