BIG YUCK! FIGHTING COVID-19 WITH INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM AND PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY

Big Yuck!  Fighting Covid-19 with Individual Freedom and Personal Responsibility

I thank Steve Pearce, head—and epitome—of the New Mexico Republican Party, for prompting this blog.  In a recent statement, Pearce opposed Governor Michelle Grisham’s efforts to slow, stop, or reverse the spread of the coronavirus which has sickened or killed thousands of New Mexicans.  Like most Republicans—north of 90 percent of them support the president; north of 70 percent support his positions on the pandemic and the election—, Pearce opposes her efforts on ideological grounds.  Individual “freedom” and “personal responsibility” resist steps toward government tyranny, matter more than human lives lost to disease and death, yet are a better approach to dealing with covid-19 than public requirements for face masks, social distancing, and restricted gatherings.

Pearce is either cynical and deceptive or naive and self-deceived.  I suspect all of the above.  He has held these Republican slogans so long that his ability to think critically about them has just shut down—so, too, other Republicans.  As a result, Republicans have no idea what responsibility means because they have debased this moral concept by transforming it into a political vacuity.  So let me tell him and them.  It is a moral agent’s willingness to be accountable to themselves or others for acts committed or omitted—that is, to accept judgment, praise or blame, reward or penalty—for acts committed or omitted because of their consequences.  The agent can be an individual, an organization, or an institution, as we know from litigation which determines responsibility or accountability.

In contexts of cause-and-effect, responsibility is clear-cut.  If I back into someone else’s car and dent a fender or break a taillight, I am clearly the responsible agent.  So, too, if I run a red light and get hit by a car with the green-light right-of-way.  But, in contexts of statistical co-occurrence of widely distributed effects like infectious diseases, the identity of the infecting person is hard to know and responsibility hard to establish.  With rare exceptions, the widespread distribution of the disease makes it hard for people with the best will in the world to know whether they are infected, have infected others, and, if so, which ones.  It is as hard for others to trace infections to their sources.  Unlike causing traffic accidents, infecting others is anonymous, unaccountable, antithetical to moral or legal responsibility.  Taking “personal responsibility” is an impossibility, and exercising individual “freedom” from public requirements is a political license to take no responsibility for endangering others, and to disregard a fundamental principle of law: liability for damages.

In this larger sense, Pearce’s advocacy of these lofty abstractions “freedom” and “social responsibility” puts him squarely in opposition not only to “law and order,” but also to the good of society.  By contrast with the Preamble to the federal Constitution, which articulates a purpose to promote the “general welfare,” the Preamble to New Mexico’s Constitution asserts a contradiction.  “We, the people of New Mexico, grateful to Almighty God for the blessings of liberty, in order to secure the advantages of a state government, do ordain and establish this constitution”—“the blessings of liberty” versus “the advantages of a state government”—about which the drafters assure us without agreeing on what they are.  Even so, public health has been historically accepted as one such advantage.  Pearce dissents; he would have us act as if individual “freedom” and “personal responsibility” are better prophylactics than sound medical and health-care advice.

More generally, Pearce denies the “advantages of a state government” and opposes its efforts to realize them.  Instead, he believes, not in the public good, but only in private goods, profits, and prosperity.  Accordingly, he has no sense of society, no belief in a fair distribution of wealth, no commitment to “liberty and justice for all,” necessarily with equal political rights, and little appreciation of the value of human life.  Worse, he and most Republicans believe that anything which unites people in joint action to support those in need is socialist—another word and its cognates whose meanings are unknown in the Republican Party but which can be used to exploit others’ ignorance and fear.

    One reasonable conclusion about his opposition to efforts to minimize the effects of the coronavirus pandemic is that Pearce does not care about public health or your health, only theirs.  Pearce knows that, if he or any member of his family contracted covid-19, he or any of them would go to the head of the line, get the best treatment—case in point: Rudy Giuliani—let his bills be paid largely with money from those at the back of the line, who expect long waits and trust to luck.  So he advocates individual “freedom” and “personal responsibility” for suckers who buy into the morally vacuous, corrupt slogans of Republicans everywhere.