Self-Interest

Psychological egoism can be described, briefly, as the idea that people always act in what they perceive their own self-interest to be. It is, to be sure, the way I commonly understand the world to work. Interestingly enough, there appears to be a strain of psychological egoist thought that holds that all human actions fall into one, and only one, of two types: self-interested and altruistic. Philosopher James Rachels took exception to the validity of psychological egoism on that basis, as follows:

The man who continues to smoke cigarettes, even after learning about the connection between smoking and cancer, is surely not acting from self-interest, not even by his own standards—self-interest would dictate that he quit smoking at once—and he is not acting altruistically either. He is, no doubt, smoking for the pleasure of it, but all that this shows is that undisciplined pleasure-seeking and acting from self-interest are very different.

This is normally the point where I wisecrack that: "If doing something that brings good feeling now, but has the possibility for nasty consequences later is self-evidently bad, one wonders why anyone ever marries."

Misogamistic snark aside, this seems to raise something that can be considered a problem with both psychological egoism and Professor Rachels' outlook; the question of what determines self-interest. Professor Rachels' seems to be in the camp that the individual themselves may not be well-placed to understand what is best for them, when compared to some outside, objective, criterion. Since there is nothing that demands that this criterion define any (let alone a strict) dichotomy between self-interest vs. concern for others, one wonders how proponents of psychological egoism deal with it. Even the normative commitments of rational egoism that Professor Rachels appeals to above don't always resolve the problem.

On the other hand, how does Professor Rachels decide that he is aware of what a person's standards for acting from self-interest are? Consider: from the ages of 15 to 34, Assault (homicide) is the leading cause of death for Black males according to the CDC/NCHS (pp. 80-81) and "[t]he very high risks tend to be concentrated in medium to large cities and low income neighborhoods within those cities, especially for homicides committed by guns," according to this University of Pennsylvania Fact Check.

Given this, would Professor Rachels have argued that, knowing this, I, as a Black man who chose to live in Chicago from the ages of 22 to 27 to be closer to my job, was "surely not acting from self-interest, not even by [my] own standards" as self-interest would have dictated that I move someplace else, regardless of any other consequences or considerations? After all, it could be argued that being unemployed in, say, DeKalb was safer than living and working in Chicago.

Cigarette smoking is "low-hanging fruit" in these sorts of arguments, because there's already been a societal consensus that it's somewhere between moderately unwise and actively stupid (with "stupid" being as much, or more, a moral descriptor than an intellectual one). So it's easy to dismiss as not being worth any trade-off. This is where the understanding that smoking violates the rational egoist's normative commitment to their long-term well-being comes from. But risking violent death because that simply comes with the territory of being well-employed enough to support oneself using the skills one paid four years and tens of thousands of dollars for. Is that as easy a call to make? I'm sure that there are people who would tell me that rather than going to college and thus finding that the best job prospects were in cities, I should have sought out some relatively tolerant small town, taken up some low-to-medium skill job and hid out from the risks of urban life there, but in the end, who is empowered to make that call? Who is allowed to tell me that it was irrational of me to live in Chicago, and take advantage of the personal and professional opportunities it afforded, given the risks?

When the choices are not clear cut, is it still understood that a rational egoist's normative commitment to long-term best interest only allows for one correct answer? And if so, what factors are at work in it? This is why I find philosophy interesting, yet rarely useful; too many of the answers it's willing to stand behind are those that have been somehow predetermined to be correct.

In the Toolbox

Although sometimes the problem is that the wrong task is chosen. Distancing is a good measure for slowing the spread of a disease. But expecting it to be useful in eradicating the disease in the face of a lack of effective treatments or prophylactics seems unrealistic. Not that I think that the epidemiological community would say that it is. But I think that there are a number of people in the public who believe that COVID-19 can be "stopped" by simple distancing. A side effect of this is that there is less emphasis on the tools that would do a better job and pushing people for accountability in making them available.

Inconvenience

The best way to get the public to continue the current restrictions, which, while inconvenient, are saving lives, is not through draconian police enforcement (though that has a role to play) but rather through consistent, credible public health messaging. This messaging is how we have shifted public opinions and practice about seat belts, smoking, and safe sex. We can do it for COVID-19, too, using three simple strategies.
This Chart Explains Why Reopening the Economy Is Still So Risky

I was unaware that wearing seat belts, lowering rates of smoking and being careful when sexually active contributed to the ongoing unemployment of millions of people. I presume that this is just the media that I am most likely to have access to, given my habits, but it seems to me that there is a massive downplaying of the ongoing effects of the current crop of stay at home orders and mandatory business closings. Describing pushing people into a situation where they potentially stand to be unemployed for years is not merely "inconvenient." There's an assumption that "the government" is "taking care" of people, and that those who find themselves furloughed or simply let go have everything they need to continue their lives as usual. The current situation is, in effect, a crappy form of "staycation." Okay, they might not be pulling in their full paychecks, and so they have to tighten their belts a bit, but as long as they don't die (or make some old person sick enough that they die) there will be no lasting harm done. This is not true. A lot of the businesses that have been forced to close are never going to re-open. Their owners simply weren't well-capitalized enough to manage a month or more with zero revenue, but ongoing expenses.

People, in my experience, tend to conceptualize "the economy" in terms of money, rather than goods and services. Therefore, if there's an economic problem, all one has to do is print more money. But while modern economies work on the exchange of money for goods and services, money is not itself a viable substitute for those goods and services. Printing money to make up for a shortfall in actual economic output is simply a driver of inflation. And while the United States is unlikely to find itself in a hyperinflationary spiral, or even return to the high inflation rates of the 1970s, in the near term, that doesn't mean the problem is non-existent. While the quest for a crisis that can repeal the laws of economics is ongoing, I doubt that Coronavirus infectious disease 2019 is the Holy Grail that people are looking for. It doesn't change the fact that people need goods and services to survive. And, in a modern economy, to continue the production of other goods and services. There are very few things that require no inputs other than what a person can supply on their own, and only a very few of those are thought to provide significant value. In this sense, "the current restrictions" are more than simply inconvenient.

If a media outlet is speaking to an audience where "everyone is working from home," they may not see it, and if they're correct in their assessment of their audience, it's unlikely that anyone will call them on it. Because the demands of juggling children, pets and the noises of the neighborhood may be new problems, but in the grand scheme of things, they can be portrayed as a small price to pay for staying healthy.

But for the person who has lost their ability to provide goods and services to trade for necessities, it's something of a time bomb. The American economy was already well past the point of being able to operate and have a significant surplus of labor. As small businesses die off, and larger ones pick up whatever pieces they chose to, that efficiency is going to ratchet down even more tightly. The person who  works for a small retailer that never reopens is unlikely to simply be able to count on demand creating a new role for them at a large chain retailer. Not because there won't be an increase in employment as customers shift to the businesses that survived the enforced shutdown, but large businesses are simply more efficient than small ones in terms of personnel needs.

It is, however, likely that retail workers and the like are not a large part of the audience of media sites like Slate, which strike me as catering more to a young, left-leaning, (sub)urban professional demographic. And there's nothing wrong with addressing articles and commentary specifically to that audience. But they aren't the whole of the set of people impacted by the mitigation measures that have been implemented. And sidestepping the effects that will linger once the immediate impacts are over doesn't do anyone any favors. A lot of people are going to be looking at long-term unemployment in a culture that tends to see that as indicative of a personal failing. The competition for work is going to be intense, and it's going to be an employer's market for the foreseeable future. That's more than simply inconvenient.

Clever

While I was out today, I came across some young people having a socially-distanced "picnic" of sorts. They'd all showed up at a movie theater parking lot, spread beach towels out on the pavement, with a good ten to fifteen feet between them and chatted with each other.

It was a clever adaptation to the circumstances. And I found myself wondering how many other clever adaptations to the world are out there, but that we may never know about, because they've been foreclosed by The Powers That Be. And I'm not just referring to government. There are a lot of forces that are interested in only having the status quo change in ways that they are familiar/comfortable with, and cleverness is sometimes neither familiar or comfortable.

The world is going to need a lot of cleverness in the coming months and years. But I wonder if the willingness to let go of comfort and familiarity in order to nurture cleverness will be there. It's unlikely that we'll remember 2019 as the last year in which prizing efficiency over resiliency was the accepted wisdom. In order to get things back to any semblance of "normalcy," there will need to be system that is highly efficient at distributing resources (as opposed to our current one, which tends to be an efficient consolidator of resources). The instinct to hoard will have to be pushed back, and that will likely result in a lot of people feeling stressed and unsafe. It will be a challenge for the greater society to deal with.

I look forwards to seeing how that challenge is met.

No Choice

One can make the case that the response to COVID-19 has been overdone in a number of ways, all of them arguable. For my part, I think that I'd argue that the attribution of things to the virus has been overdone. A lot of the effects that society is dealing with are not a direct result of the virus itself, but our response to it. This is not to say that not responding would have changed all of them. But many of the specific things that we see are the result of the stay-at-home orders, mandatory business closures and other measures that have been enacted by people.

And this is important because it tells us that we have a certain level of control over things. Not in terms of the events that occur in the world on every give day, or even in how things play out in the end, but in our responses to them. The idea that taking whatever option one believes is the lesser of the available evils is not a choice is a recipe for feeling out of control, and that feeling of being puppeteered by outside events often leads to anxiety and stress.

Still I understand the impulse. Being understood to not have a choice often frees people from the accountability that comes with decision-making. But I think that taking ownership when it's there is a better course in the long run. Not, I suspect, that people would agree with me on that.