Thread by @ClaireBerlinski

Are you aware that your behavior makes it more likely that other people will die? Does this concern you? Or do you think, "That idea triggers me, so I won't think about it?"

https://twitter.com/sleightHanded/status/1368605497289367556

Don't reply with some airy argument about "Death comes for us all," or "We all kill each other every day if you think about it, innit?" Very specifically: If you become a vector for this disease, you could kill many people--much loved by their families--in a super-spreader event.

Old, fat, sick people, perhaps, but also maybe some people who just got unlucky. Would you want someone else to be that careless about the life of someone you love? To speed blind drunk down the freeway right when your daughter is driving home, say?

Do you want the aircraft mechanic to say, "Screw it, most of the time these planes don't need the backup hydraulic system anyway. I can't be bothered to check it. It's a sunny day. Time to work on my tan. Life's about living, right?"

Or do you think, perhaps, a well-lived life at times requires discretion about risk, restraint, and concern for the well-being of others? That living in a civilized society at times requires us to inconvenience ourselves so that we don't create tragedies for others?

If this is hard: The reason we should not be careless with other people's lives, or those of their loved ones, is that we would not wish them to be careless with ours, or those of our loved ones.

You can't really go wrong with, "Do unto others as you would have them do to do." I'm sure you wouldn't want other people to, say, shoot randomly into your parents' retirement home. Would you?

You wouldn't want someone carelessly to spike your drinking water with cyanide, say, because it would be a lark. So probably you shouldn't do things that are apt to spread a communicable disease that's already killed 540,000 of your fellow citizens.

If you do, you can't really complain that the rest of us are, as you put it, "self-righteous."

Though the word I'd used is "appalled."

You're rather lucky that the only punishment you're apt to experience for your psychopathy is the sting of a few "self-righteous" comments on Twitter.

In this world, anyway.