When Shakespeare was writing plays and a part owner of the Globe Theatre across the Thames River from London, several times when there was a plague raging in London in the summer, the City Aldermen ordered all the playhouses closed as an aid to social distancing. Most of the actors fled town. Some playhouses went bankrupt. Was this a restriction of freedom? Yes! Was it moral? Yes!
In the great Italian writer Boccaccio’s masterwork, The Decameron, a bunch of people social distancing from the Bubonic Plague around 1348 entertained each other by telling stories. They had the money to flee to the country. Most people didn’t have that option. The tale tellers had the freedom to flee, and they fled. Most of us also have that freedom in The Villages. Other people have to work to serve us. They don’t have that freedom. Is our freedom moral? Yes. Is it moral to not do whatever we can to assure their health? No, that would be immoral.
There are many active diseases around the world that sometimes cause epidemics, and when they aren’t, it is usually because some people are giving up their freedom temporarily to prevent the spread of disease. For example, cholera, typhus, typhoid and malaria. Some of these still kill 300,000 or more people a year. They all have the potential to kill enormous numbers of people. Other diseases have come close to breaking loose and killing millions, but again were prevented because of thousands or millions who temporarily gave up freedoms, and thousands who risked their lives to care for people dying of these diseases, such as SARS, MERS, and Ebola. If everyone had insisted on having the freedom to go wherever they wanted, to visit sick patients as they lay dying, to maintain their usual funeral rites, many millions of people probably would have died.
The Villages pays for insecticidal spraying to decrease the number of mosquitoes and other nasty insects and the attendant diseases. Some people say that robs them of their freedom to not have insecticide on their lawns and shrubs. They say mosquitoes and other insects feed the birds. But sometimes there is a hedonic calculus (see the philosopher Jeremy Bentham—a favorite of Thomas Jefferson) that comes into play, letting us figure out what approach allows the most happiness and the least loss of freedom.
I’m a proud American, just like most of you, and I treasure my freedoms, just as you do, but I am also willing to temporarily surrender some freedoms in order to help others (and also myself) longer enjoy the pursuit of happiness. As far as I’m concerned, people who want to insist on their freedom to spread disease to others because temporary laws requiring social distancing, masks, and closed restaurants or golf courses restrict their precious American freedoms are immoral, un-American, and barely even human.
Go complain to General George Washington, who required that all of his troops at Valley Forge receive smallpox vaccinations, whether they wanted to or not. Several of these men died from the vaccinations, but possibly hundreds were saved.
|