I missed the memo on participation. When someone encourages me to join with other people to work in some good direction, I always ask, “If I don’t, what difference will it make?” And, when the answer is, “By itself, your action won’t change anything,” I put that request in a “non-urgent” folder. It isn’t my highest priority, though it might be worth doing.
I see this reflex as partly a personal quirk. I grew up in a situation in which I had little opportunity to participate in movements or group actions. The example through which participation was introduced to me was the war effort in World War II. My father had enlisted in the army. My mother had interrupted college to work in defense industries. Both were proud of doing their part to beat the Germans and the Japanese. Even before the Vietnam conflict raised questions about the wisdom of U.S. choices to go to war, I balked at the idea of being a small contributor to a vast killing machine. I might be happy to take a shot at someone like Hitler, but this other thing, this slaughter of draftees by draftees, seemed kinky to me. This made a difference with my parents that persisted for decades. They were eccentrics and rebels, but I was an outsider.
When I came to study moral philosophy, and met some passionate participants in unions and political movements and boycotts, I tried to understand more about my peculiarity (as Hannibal Lecter might try to understand his idiosyncratic food choices). I admired vegetarians for being vegetarians. I admired people who took trouble to go vote. I admired people who marched. Those actions and commitments seemed to me part of beautiful ways of going at the world. So was my mother’s gardening, my father’s reading binges, my sister’s engagement with raising prize hogs. A life, I decided, is composed of lots of projects and decisions, not all of which immediately change anything. Having a life of a certain richness and intensity and coherence allows one to work in the world in good ways, to make good differences sometimes. Participation is part of some people’s character.
I held on to one idea from my ‘outsider’ past: participation is a moral option. The right thing to say to non-participants is, “You may be missing out on a dimension of life that matters” but not “You are doing something wrong.” I think it is good for people to have gardens. I would encourage people to have gardens. I would never criticize someone for not having a garden.
Partly, I was drawn to this view by the thought that there are many possible movements, and that the most participatory people only engage with a few of them. United States citizens, contemporary people in 2020, are downstream from an incredible mass of cruelty, exploitation, pure evil. The economy rests on exploitative relations, and its foundations were dug in the time of slavery. The land many people live on is stolen land. Animals have been degraded into meat machines. Resource allocation decisions have privileged the current generation over all future generations. If one is to opt out of all that - doing, in every instance, that which, if everyone did it, would make things better, one will have a life that is pure participation. The most ardent participators I know stop well short of this.
Here is an example. The Black Hills were stolen from native peoples, and the descendents of the victims have never consented to the theft. The ‘compensation’ money remains unclaimed. Suppose someone decided not to travel through that country, not to support any enterprise based there – to treat the Black Hills as private property, its inhabitants as criminal intruders. Clearly, the only immediate external effect of that would be that the person would lose a wonderful vacation option. But it would not take all that many such decisions to make white economy in the Black Hills unviable. It is surely no more of a stretch to support such a movement than it is to support ‘going vegan’ as a way to transform the livestock industries.
If someone were to decide to skip the Black Hills, to take the boring route west instead, I’d respect that: that is, I’d see it as part of an interesting and beautiful way of going at the world. I would consider it as an option for myself, but only as an option, one way of living an upright life.
The proposal for social distancing and self-isolation provoked by the coronavirus is a different case. Most of the rules are not readily enforceable, so, in one sense, compliance is a matter of choice.
However, this choice is in a different category from voting or enlisting or recycling, because any individual might be a super-spreader and any gathering might be a super-spreading event. One cannot know whether one will, by oneself, cause great harm, or whether an encounter will cause great harm. Most important, so far as I can tell from reading the stories of the major “superspreader events” (the Westport soiree, the Biogen conference, the Skagit Chorale rehearsal, the Mitchell funeral), there is no clear common element, and so no way of estimating the risk that one will spread the disease. There are two aspects to risk here: (1) my own actions may spread the disease; and (2) my obvious carelessness may encourage others to be similarly careless, and their actions may spread the disease. Since nobody knows how widespread the virus is, these risks have to count decisively, where-ever the virus has established a foothold.
This is a situation in which participation is not morally optional, because it is wrong to risk causing great harm (in a way that it is not wrong to opt out of good practices). The central moral argument is not: “If everyone does this, we will all be safer and the vulnerable will be protected.” The central argument is: “If you do not adopt these practices, you risk causing great harm.” It is an individual and particular causal argument.
How great is the risk? We can’t tell, without testing. And we can’t test.
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