I’ve been thinking about this for a long while in the context of the pandemic: there seems to be an understandable line of thinking that if you can practically afford it (ie it doesn’t take away from your ability to actually live), “good” people should be willing to sacrifice anything and everything in their own lives for as long as it takes to save lives and control the virus. If they do not, they are morally deficient and or just simply bad people (or maybe, at best, stupid).
Obviously, few people literally think that way. But I was wondering where the lines were drawn, especially across billions of people all around the world. At what point do you feel comfortable in passing moral judgment on folks for prioritizing some personal comfort or preference above the “greater good” in cases like we see today? Are there levels involved (e.g. do you judge someone who goes out to a bar on a random Saturday night more harshly than someone who gives in to temptation and goes to see family at a private home for the first time since April)?
Hopefully people see what I’m getting at, because I think there’s some interesting discussion to be had.
My general belief is that evil is defined as selfishness that ignores harm to others. Thus, if you’re selfish in a way that tries to mitigate harm to others (or, even better, helps others), then I have no problem with it. That would be your seeing family at a private home, assuming you otherwise try to keep from infecting others if you wound up getting sick.
I also do not consider doing the bare minimum to survive as selfish. This includes obvious things like doing things to eat, have shelter, etc., but also things that allow you to maintain mental health enough to function. It’s not selfish to take care of yourself–in general or during this pandemic.
It’s the part where you genuinely care about others that allows an otherwise selfish action not to be evil. It’s the callousness I see that has led me to believe there are a lot more evil people walking among us than I previously believed.
Taking “more than your fair share” is bad morals when you’re actively taking away from someone else.
It isn’t necessarily bad morals to, say, live in a big house when there are homeless people in town, because you’re not actively taking away their housing. Living in a big house, and voting against measures that would help the homeless, because it would increase your property tax (and you can actually afford the increase) – that’s immoral.
I don’t really understand what this means. What would I have to sacrifice in my life to save lives and control the virus? Wearing a mask and social distancing are not sacrifices; not socializing in groups is not a sacrifice, at least for me. Those are things I do to take care of myself anyway. So what else is there? Be willing to pay more taxes? Volunteer to go grocery shopping for shut-ins? None of these things seem very onerous to me, and if the taxes go up you pay them, willing or not. I wish you could be more clear what kinds of things you are talking about.
One point: volunteering to help others who need help is always optional, and not volunteering cannot be judged immoral by any outsider. Matters of conscience are, by their nature, personal.
Absolutely! So what are those lines to you? That’s what I was asking.
How long are you willing to social distance? Years? Would you negatively judge someone who expresses concern over doing it for years? Would you judge someone who misses social activities as not caring about saving lives? When people say that mental health is being harmed by extended social distancing, do you believe them, and is it an issue at all to you? There seem to be plenty of examples and similar situations out there in general discussion. Maybe you don’t notice because you do think that any individual sacrifice a person can make for any period of time is trivial given the goal, in which case, you’ve already answered!
Some current examples that helped inspire this post:
In GD, there’s a thread speculating on whether mask wearing should just be a legal requirement in the United States permanently. There are people objecting to that or expressing distaste with it. Are they selfish? I mean, we’ve spent so much time talking about how minor mask wearing is.
There’s a Pit thread about being “fed up” with the pandemic. Several replies are basically snarky “yeah, all those people dead are probably fed up with it too.” Is the OP there selfish?
The discussion in the Quarantine Zone is getting a bit heated between New Zealanders and somewhat jingoistic Americans. The latter seems (to me) to think that said New Zealanders are passing moral judgment on Americans in general for the state of the virus here. Are they, and are they actually correct to do so if they are?
How correct as a moral position/judgment is “people should be willing to make any reasonable personal sacrifice that is not a detriment to their ability to physically live for any or indefinite amount of time without complaint”?
Well as far as masks specifically go, when I work, I wear a mask, and when I go into a store I wear a mask. That’s about as far as I’m willing to go, I’m not going to walk around outside with a mask. Nearly half, something like 45% of deaths are people in long term care facilities. People that are concerned for their own wellbeing can stay home, I’m not going to do that. Though just the way things have worked out when everything was shut down I did pretty much stay home every day.
Tens of thousands of people are killed and injured on the roads each year. We could save all those lives by making the reasonable sacrifice of not driving cars. The Amish manage it. I think it’s clear we are willing to accept a certain number of deaths in exchange for our collective or personal convenience, why should the pandemic be treated any differently?
I don’t know what the right place to draw the line is, but yeah, I’m deeply uncomfortable with the way anything other than minimum-risk-taking-in-every-possible-circumstance is getting stigmatized as “selfish.” (Though mostly only the kind of risk-taking that people perceive as frivolous or pleasurable – I don’t see anybody shaming anyone for getting a routine dental cleaning, even though this isn’t strictly “necessary,” and is clearly a much higher-risk activity than going to the beach, which was a favorite target of the shame-and-blame crowd over the summer. Likewise, there seems to be a general attitude that it is admirable for a young person to volunteer as a poll worker on Election Day but morally wrong for them to visit any elderly relative ever, although with a reasonable degree of precautions the latter would seem to be much less conducive to spreading the virus than the former. Heck, back in the spring there was even a Quarantine Zone thread piling on somebody who just wanted to go for a solo drive in the country, which would seem to be the most zero-risk leisure activity ever. I don’t think anyone still has that attitude seven or eight months on, but I do think people kind of conflate the actual risk of an activity with the amount of pleasure involved and add a heavy layer of moralizing on top of that, and they also have a tendency toward a sort of magical thinking where if we just all sacrificed enough it would bring the pandemic to an end.)
I don’t think we’re really seeing people taking that position, though. I think what we’re seeing is people resisting making personal sacrifices that they don’t believe are worth it. They resent being asked to give up something important to them just to give a slight nudge to the probability that someone will get sick.
Keep in mind that
People are notoriously bad at understanding and estimating risk
With respect to Covid, it’s new, and it’s been taking us awhile to learn just how risky various activities are and how much various precautions and changes to behavior matter.
And it’s not just the novelty, but the fact that people have been spreading misinformation.
The tragedy of the commons: What if it takes everybody pulling together to make a difference, but I know/believe that some people won’t do their part? So if I make sacrifices, I lose out, while other people who do what they want continue to spread the disease anyway.
We could save most of those lives by making the reasonable sacrifice of not driving cars recklessly, not driving intoxicated, not texting and driving. Driving isn’t selfish, driving unsafely is.
While we do have a tradeoff of a number of deaths due to our use of cars, it’s not like we don’t do what we can to lower that number, through enforcing safe driving, and also making the cars themselves safer.
Anyway, I consider going to the store to be like driving, a necessary risk. I consider going to the store without a mask on and taking other precautions to be like driving 30 over the limit while drunk and texting.
Not to mention, we had less than 40,000 car related deaths last year, compared to 230,000 Covid deaths so far this year. If cars killed nearly ten times as many as they currently do, I would think that we would be thinking very hard on that trade-off.
Ehhh… just google Amish killed in buggy accident. It’s pretty common. I could link to a whole bunch of stories, but that seemed a bit spammy to me.
Well, there is an awful lot to unpack in this statement, just about every word needs to be defined in order to answer. I suspect that every person would have a slightly different view of what “willing”, “reasonable”, “sacrifice”, etc etc, mean.
Setting aside COVID specifically (as others have done mentioning auto accidents), this suggests a larger discussion of how people engage in society. It is worth mentioning that the US culture has a strong individuality streak that is not the same in other cultures - hence the strong resistance to wearing masks as giving up “freedom”. Is that individualism in general a good thing, or a bad thing? Maybe it’s a good thing when talking about self reliance, entrepreneurship, and exploration (historically). But it seems like a bad thing when talking about hunkering down for a pandemic. To me, yes, I am a classic Libra) no discussion of this sort is “Yes/No”.
Regarding passing judgement on others due to their viewpoint and behavior, I am of the opinion that we as a society have somehow lost the concept of “shame”. Historically “shame” has been an important tool in guard-railing behavior. ISTM (at the risk of sounding like an old person) EVERYTHING is relative, and instead we rely on laws (if it ain’t illegal, it’s OK). And even then, we have seen a drift in the direction of (coughTrump) de-ligitimizing laws and enforcers.
That said, it ends up boiling down to personal choice, which is by definition a selfish framework. The people who diligently wear masks and don’t go out are engaging in selfish behavior just as the refuse-niks are, yah? Regardless of how they came to their conclusions.
Good point. I hadn’t thought of it, but any form of transport is going to have risks.
Yeah. We consider some precautions worth taking (and enforcing), but not others (eg lowering speed limit to 20mph in built up areas). Presumably there is some kind of cost/benefit calculation going on.
I think it’s common to take new or unusual threats more seriously and this is affecting attitudes to the virus, but otherwise it’s similar. If you believe someone driving home after a couple of drinks is immoral, then you probably think the same of someone going shopping without a mask.
How much do you appreciate mandates for the temp of hot water in restaurant dishwashers? Or mandates of cooking temps? Safe food storage mandates, etc? Nobody dies from food poisoning, they have to do all that to protect other people. Does that upset you? Or does it make a benefit to society at large? Is that a sacrifice worth making?
And what about the surgeon operating on your kid’s heart? The risk is largely to the child, and it’s SMALL. His job is already very challenging and exacting. Should he make that sacrifice to protect someone else? Do you want him wearing the mask? Or not?
And why is everybody ok for ages with signs reading, ‘No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service!’ Would anybody have listened to the shirtless guy rage on about his rights? No, no one would bother even engaging. Because he should be smart enough to figure this out himself, and he’s high on drugs! But these mask people are all being humoured like they actually have a constitutional right to shop at the gas bar.
It’s kinda baffling, to a lot of the rest of the world, I think.