Admit It: You Are Willing to Let People Die to End the Shutdown
Excerpt: The pandemic highlights a different way of understanding relativism. It is not that values are no more than a matter of taste, in the way that you like pistachio but I like vanilla. It is to acknowledge—in a way our politics usually does not—that any important value is inevitably, at key moments, in competition with other important values. Individual liberties are in tension with public order. Respect for tradition is in tension with tolerance for diversity. And, yes, averting some number of tragic deaths from coronavirus is in tension with the need for a much larger number of people to resume life—sometime after it is no longer reckless to do so but sometime before it is perfectly safe. An honest brand of politics, which we urgently need, admits the tension and tries in good faith—with reference to evolving evidence and with acknowledgment of uncertainty—to resolve it in the public interest. A dishonest brand of politics, of which we are wearily familiar, assumes a pose of superiority and certitude, and cares about evidence mostly as it can be deployed as a weapon or shield in a partisan argument that began long before the issue at hand and will continue long after. It’s worth noting the shift in worldviews. During the pandemic, conservatives are much more likely to be relativists—everyone dies of something eventually so let’s keep this disease in perspective—while liberals generally are quicker to assume the absolutist stance—let’s stay shut down for as long as health experts tell us we need to save lives. [This is a brilliant, honest essay examining the difficulties of (especially political) decision making. Very much worth reading. The unavoidable truth is people will die no matter what we decide, so the question becomes how to best balance our needs and desires. Ron P.]
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