It’s that being a Good Samaritan is about more than intentions. The Good Samaritan does not simply wish to help; he acts skillfully and to entirely good effect.
We should already find the parable suspect as an analytic framework given that the Good Samaritan does not use physical coercion to help the traveler whom thieves have beset. The thieves are gone.
One could be a Good Samaritan by defending someone against thieves. But suppose the Samaritan saw what he considered a potential thief approaching a traveler, restrained the suspected thief, and killed him in the process. How to view the Samaritan would not be immediately clear. A lot would depend on both whether we had strong grounds to conclude that the suspected thief was in fact about to attack and whether we thought the Samaritan had killed the thief — not merely restrained him and delivered him to justice — unreasonably. If we thought the Samaritan had jumped to a hasty conclusion and needlessly killed someone, we would have the makings of a poor parable.
Whether Penny jumped to a hasty conclusion and needlessly killed someone is not something I can judge. But it is of central importance to any moral or legal judgment of his lethal act. To say “Let’s take the side of the Good Samaritan because he meant well — but morally and legally important details will yet emerge” makes little sense. What follows that dash vitiates what precedes it.
It’s also wrong to assume without evidence that Penny’s motivations were racist or to immediately reduce his intervention to social forces such as systemic racism. I understand that such assumptions are what motivate the Good Samaritan comparison. But would it not be better to suspend all these judgments for now? To focus, that is, on the case at hand instead of working it into a sweeping political narrative and counter-narrative that overwhelms particulars?
Instant big-narrative responses to politically charged criminal accusations are reactionary. They demonstrate how reaction is not an exclusively right-wing phenomenon but can be found toward either end of the political spectrum. They also demonstrate one of the more insidious problems with reaction: analogies that, rather than clarifying our view, make it harder to grasp the situation supposedly under discussion.