Thread by @jendziura

I’d like to talk about people for whom Death Is Not a Counterargument.

I read about the recent anti-vaxx/mask protest in DC, where they played songs by Meat Loaf, an anti-vaxx/masker who reportedly died of Covid

To a normal person — to me — this would be embarrassing! Right? The person you’re lionizing was so wrong they (reportedly) died as a result of their wrongness. But they don’t feel that way. They don’t see his views as proven wrong.

To someone like that, no evidence about the safety and effectiveness of vaccines, and the lethality of Covid or any future pandemic, will ever be enough: they are arguing for the liberty to die and to kill others

As I have written before: progressives develop policy by looking at suffering and harm in the world and reasoning backwards.

The conservative mind does the reverse: decide what “rights” they believe people have (often based on property), and ignore any and all consequences, no matter how dire. They believe this is noble. Ignoring results makes you strong and your reasoning pure.

So, anti-vaxxers dying of Covid isn’t something that embarrasses them or changes their mind. Their concept of liberty is something decided prior to results and that cannot be changed by results.

They believe that adjusting the concept of liberty based on saving lives would be corrupt, because it reasons backwards. If a fundamental right can change based on circumstances, it was never a right at all. No matter the body count.

So, this is why Sandy Hook wasn’t ever the “surely THIS will convince them” of commensense gun laws. There is no “THIS” that will change the mind of someone who believes that basing policy on results is weak and corrupt.

There’s no body count, no body count of children, no sad story, no death of a beloved musician or a loved one, that changes the mind of someone who reasons in this way.

When you argue with someone about this, it’s easy to get lost in the details of how and whether vaccines work, who exactly is dying and how much we should care, but: you’re not even on the right track to changing their policy views. It’s a side argument to them.

So now we’re back to philosophy 101: where do rights come from? The Constitution? God? The contract (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau?) They’re inherent in all humans, but we still can’t agree on what they are?

And it might seem stupid to have that debate when what you really want to say is: put on a mask at Target, it’s not a big deal, 800K people are dead. But if one person reasons from consequences and the other one thinks God or the Founders gave them the right to endanger others…

My answer, BTW, to where rights come from is that they come from us — we made them up — and that the goal of a civilization is to roll out more rights over time.

It may once have been impossible to have a “right to housing,” but it isn’t now! We can make it a right! That’s why we’re here! Future generations should have rights humans previously couldn’t have dreamed of. Medical care, higher ed!

I don’t believe in a god of rights who decided once and for all what the rights are. And any attempt to have a single, fixed source of rights runs into serious problems of interpretation. Hence the existence of the Supreme Court, the various formulations of the social contract…

So I have a formulation of rights that indeed allows for change based on circumstances! If alien snakes invaded the planet and could only be fought off with, IDK, cinnamon, I’d say we should roll out a right to cinnamon as soon as possible.

Less ridiculously, the more college educations become necessary, the better case for making a right! I think people should have a right to preventative medical tests that couldn’t have been a right decades ago bc they didn’t exist! More rights! We can do it! It’s why we’re here!

My view is undoubtedly INFURIATING to some gun-toting fellows who believe the rights got doled out to Americans (some Americans!) and they can’t change — no matter what pandemic arises, or how today’s guns are a far cry from the muskets the founders had in mind

(Cue the sexist insults here as well. Tell a conservative you think “liberty” is the freedom to go to college even if you’re poor and to know you can get cancer treatment, and somehow things get gendered super fast! Maybe I’ll dig into that another time)

Anyway: this is why anti-vaxx protestors aren’t embarrassed when their heroes die of Covid. They think they’re stronger and more pure for persevering in their belief despite the death toll. Beliefs generated prior to consequences that cannot be revised in light of consequences.

Here’s my original thread from 2018:

https://twitter.com/jendziura/status/1068164241998446594