Thread by @jwpnfld

The failed response to the COVID-19 pandemic is best understood as an ethical failure, not a scientific or technical one.

It is rooted in the abdication of responsibility on the part of those in authority, but of everyday people as well. It is a failure of common decency.

On the one hand, leaders gave up on the duty of care they owe the public. Some leaders capitulated to economic interests. Some to political pressure. Some to simple weakness and expediency.

In the worst cases, they actively undermined basic notions of moral responsibility.

But on the other hand, it is an ethical failure that implicates everyday people, too.

Everyone is responsible for the predictable consequences of their actions. It is no excuse that the government said it was okay or to be ignorant of the harms when it is easy to be informed.

In fact, the strategy for this "learning to live with it" phase of the pandemic is precisely to allow people to believe they are not responsible for the predictable consequences of their actions, encapsulated in the ideas of "personal risk management."

If someone believes they are responsible only for their own risk and their own well-being, then infecting other people or participating in a culture of mass infection is not wrong. It is always the other person's responsibility for their own well-being.

This is, of course, totally absurd, amounting to a denial that actions impact others. The abdication of responsibility also enables behaviours that are not just self-centred but actively hostile to the rights and existence of people with disabilities and those who are vulnerable.

Calls for reasonable management of the pandemic are met with the phrase "You want us to stay in lockdown forever," as if there is only absolute isolation or unchecked mass infection.

Part of the aversion to any precautions is precisely because it highlights the ethical failure.

The call for common decency is likewise simply saying that we owe one another the most basic respect and have a duty not to cause obvious harm.

It is not calling for utopia or saying everything was perfect before. Just that we should at least try to be good to each other.

If we truly are now at a place where encouragement from those in authority means people give up on moral responsibility, and where basic common decency is abandoned, then there is good reason to be concerned about where this may lead.