It’s a common refrain today that those who have given up on Covid precautions should not entirely be blamed. The government has hidden the true risks of Covid infections; lied about its principal avenue of transmission (our shared air); and engaged in a campaign of getting people “back to work” so comprehensively, and so filled with half-truths and misdirections about public health, that it can only be understood as propaganda. And propagandized people, this refrain suggests, are not to blame for what they do not know. It is institutions, not individuals, whom we should go after (see below, for example, a controversial and now-deleted tweet from ACT UP New York).
Nonetheless, these propagandized individuals are getting a lot of people sick. A failure to quarantine when infected with Covid spreads infection to others in public — beyond the initial discomfort of the acute infection, this carries a serious risk of life-altering disability (in the form of Long Covid). Because of this risk, disabled people and those avoiding disability have been pushed out of public life, having to choose their safety over their access to the public sphere.
Moreover, the seemingly endless cycle we find ourselves in with repeated waves of Covid is caused by those who have abandoned precautions and spread Covid when sick. The millions who have died of Covid got it from someone; the tens of millions of people with Long Covid got it somewhere. Covid is not an abstract phenomenon — it is a virus that moves through our bodies, and those who have given up on Covid precautions have become a sort of superhighway for viral spread, keeping us locked in to repeated waves. This spread happens whether they know it or not.
I’ve written previously on the extent to which this not-knowing is in fact motivated by misplaced desire, how it is not simply a gap in knowledge but rather a positive not-knowing filled with falsehoods. My hope was to show that most of what people think they know about Covid is in fact a tremendous epistemic failure, what I’ve termed “abled ignorance.” What I’m interested in today is a question of blame: Are those who have abandoned precautions out of “abled ignorance” to blame? And if so, is their blameworthiness mitigated to any extent by their not-knowing? After all, this is exactly what the refrain above suggests — that giving up on Covid precautions shouldn’t be seen as a moral failure because “they know not what they do.” I want to know whether this is true.
Knowing and Intending
I think the first question to get out of the way is whether knowingly spreading debilitating illness is blameworthy. Knowing often goes hand in hand with intending, and surely doing so intentionally is morally blameworthy — bioterrorism is terrorism, after all. Intentionally inflicting death and disease on other people counts as a moral harm under every moral theory I know of — it violates the most basic entitlement that people have to their own bodily autonomy. When harm is the intended effect, someone has crossed the line.
Things get trickier when we think about unintentional cases, and the trickiness revolves around what else we might mean by knowingly. The person who goes to work while sick with Covid is usually different from the bioterrorist — they may know they have Covid, but they most likely don’t intend to spread it. Rather, spreading the illness is (in their eyes, if they’re aware) an unfortunate byproduct of a separate intentional choice (i.e., going to work). These are the far more common cases where knowing and intending come apart. We may still have strong objections to the indifference with which this person regards the “unfortunate” byproduct (disabling her coworkers, for example). But it is at least important to point out that those objections will be different than the ones we make towards the bioterrorist: in one, the harm is the point; in the other, it is not.
This is the difference that people implicitly highlight when they suggest that it is institutions, not individuals, who are to blame for the spread of Covid. After all, very few people are intentionally disabling others. In many cases, they’re just trying to survive in a world without paid sick leave or a social safety net. And very few people are knowingly disabling people, either — people often don’t even know that they’re still contagious with Covid, or that spreading Covid is also spreading the risk of severe disability (“It’s just a cold!”). The lack of knowledge in all these cases is the direct result of neoliberal propaganda. And so, the refrain goes, “they know not what they do.”
However different these two cases may be, I want to push back on the idea that ignorance absolves them, and I want to do so through the invocation of the concept of negligence. In what follows, I’ll argue that moral accountability also attaches to the unintended outcomes of our actions when those unintended outcomes are ones about which we should have known. This is not a new form of moral accountability — discussion of negligence goes as far back as medieval Roman law — but its application to a novel pathogen reveals a great deal about what we owe one another when public health has failed.
Negligence
The most useful concept for understanding this type of diffuse moral responsibility is the concept of negligence. Negligence is the category of moral responsibility that deals in counterfactuals — what we should have known, should have done, even if we didn’t actually know or do. It is a way of understanding moral accountability for unintended harm. After all, what’s the difference between the drunk driver who injures someone on the road and the sober driver who does the same? Neither of them intends to injure; and yet, we have very different intuitions about which of them is at fault and which was merely involved in a tragic accident.
The crucial difference between the two comes down to whether they should have known better. The sober driver who gets in an accident did not subject other drivers to any unusual risk: she was of clear mind, driving carefully, and unfortunately two cars collided. There’s in a sense no choice she made that enhanced the risk that other drivers already consent to when they get on the road. It is a risk that we all work to minimize, but which unfortunately comes to fruition from time to time.
The drunk driver, however, should have known that driving drunk carries a higher risk of injury and death and that others do not consent to this risk; he therefore should have acted in the light of these facts and, say, taken the train home instead. In other words, driving drunk is a way of moving through a world filled with other people as if you didn’t owe them some minimum amount of care. This is what negligence is all about — those times when injury to others is a foreseeable risk that the actor chooses to ignore. He should have known better.
Negligence shows us that we are not responsible for every unintentional harm to others that we, in some way, cause. This is generally a good thing — it would be morally messy and probably unreasonable to hold me responsible for every downstream negative effect, completely unforeseeable to me, of something I do (maybe my great-grandchild is emotionally distressed by reading something in my diary; surely I’m not responsible for this). Rather, negligence tightens the sphere of moral responsibility back to the boundaries of foreseeable risk: everything within those boundaries counts as ours to repair, to remedy, to avoid.
The question for us, then, is where abandoning Covid precautions and unintentionally spreading Covid is in relation to this boundary — whether it’s analogous to drunk driving or sober driving. To bring it back to our first question: are those who have abandoned precautions out of “abled ignorance” to blame? Or is the harm of catching Covid every so often just one of the risks that we accept when we go out in public, rendering the spread more like a tragic accident than like culpable negligence?
Culpable Ignorance
The people who have abandoned Covid precautions, and therefore make no effort to curtail the spread of infection as it passes through them, are to blame when they get others sick. In this respect, it is like drunk driving.
For starters, the harm of Covid goes beyond the baseline risk that we all accept when we step out into public. As I described above, Covid is not “just a cold.” Getting infected with Covid carries a 10-20% risk of debilitating Long Covid symptoms that severely impact one’s life and for which there is no known cure and very few treatments. Infection also carries a meaningful risk of dying from both the acute infection as well as heart attack and stroke in the subsequent months. We are not just talking about a few days feeling bad — we’re talking about a lifetime of severe disability. Nobody should be forced to take on a risk this high, and this severe, when navigating public life. Part of what it means to have a right to bodily autonomy is that we are not forced to choose between our health and our participation in public life.
These risks are also entirely foreseeable. We have more than four years of peer-reviewed data showing the long-term harm of Covid, which organ systems are damaged (all of them), and how these risks accumulate and magnify after each infection. If people want to know, they can. Thus we have all the ingredients necessary for a charge of negligence — spreading Covid is harmful, people should know that it is harmful, and they should therefore act in the light of these facts and reduce the chances that they will enact this particular form of harm on others. They should, in other words, adopt Covid precautions. A failure to act in the light of a foreseeable and severe harm is the definition of negligence. So we have our answer to the first question of this essay.
This is exactly where the refrain comes back in, though: “It’s not a simple case of ignorance! They don’t know better because they’ve been propagandized, and being propagandized isn’t their fault. We should blame the institutions, not the individuals.” To some extent, I sympathize with this position. They’re correct — we have all been propagandized. The political cover-up of Covid constitutes one of the greatest public health failures of the last century, a failure in a long line of failures so egregious that the overthrow of the state starts looking like the conservative position. It is a dereliction of some of the core duties of the polis: to safeguard public health, to disseminate true and timely information, to achieve collectively what is impossible to achieve individually. We should do more than blame our institutions — we should burn them down.
At the same time, these failures do not absolve us of what we owe each other. When times are good, it’s nice to offload some of these responsibilities onto the well-functioning state: we don’t have to feed our neighbors because the state is doing it; we don’t have to contribute to GoFundMe’s because we have universal, state-subsidized healthcare. The state really can be a surrogate executor of our moral life, the bureaucrats we trust to keep us in good standing with respect to one another. But we shouldn’t be confused about what is happening when we do this: it’s not that the state has its own obligations; it’s that we are using the state to discharge our own. When the state crumbles, we’re left holding our obligations once again.
That is the situation we find ourselves in now. The politicians have failed, there is a massive public health cover-up underway, and millions have died. Nonetheless, we must somehow pick up the slack. This is the line between political philosophy and ethics — both of them trace our moral obligations to one another, but the latter obligations persist even, and especially, when everything goes to shit. The state can collapse, and yet we shouldn’t kill each other. The state can lie, and yet we have obligations to know the truth. The widespread abled ignorance that we are surrounded by is pervasive, no doubt, but it is an ignorance that can be overcome; this fact alone undermines any thought that it absolves people of wrongdoing when they abandon Covid precautions. We can blame institutions, and we should. But we can also blame individuals for what they refuse to know, the ways in which they refuse to care.
In a sense, this is one of the tragedies of moral life: that political injustice can render our ethical lives exceedingly difficult. Because I do not want to deny the extent to which fulfilling our ethical obligations to one another during an active cover-up of a pandemic is extremely challenging. It requires an immense amount of hope, of intellectual curiosity, of social fortitude, and of tolerance for standing alone. We are constantly put into compromising positions where it’s unclear how we could possibly do the right thing. And yet, we must. We owe it to one another to refrain from harm; to show a minimum standard of care for the bodily autonomy of others; and to pick up the slack when the normal structures and institutions which we use to do this falter. The pandemic has laid bare our crumbling moral infrastructure and presented us with an opportunity to show up for one another in a direct way, unmediated by the state and all of its bureaucracy. It is only fair, then, to blame those who have squandered this opportunity and then denied that it was ever on the table. We owe each other that, too.