A Twitter spat flared up last night over comments made by a conservative US commentator, Ben Shapiro, in a clip from an interview with Dave Rubin. The comments in question centred around Shapiro raising the point that when it comes to assessing the impact and response of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a difference between the death of a young person and an elderly one.
I haven't seen the entire interview, nor do I plan to - neither Rubin nor Shapiro are commentators I am a fan of - so will confine myself to the short clip and not address any wider points Shapiro might have been making. Although Twitter predictably reacted as though Shapiro had suggested the elderly be abandoned to die, his point was that when deciding how much of the economy and people's long-term quality-of-life to sacrifice in preventing COVID-19 deaths, age has to be part of the calculation. His point is adjacent to arguments I made in an article from earlier this month weighing up the costs of sacrificing our freedom and the economy against the need to keep people safe, albeit focusing on age rather than personal liberty. This is an issue which can be debated ad nauseam, but the topic made me think of another issue glanced upon in my aforementioned article, about the occasional necessity of hypocrisy in stating a principle against applying it.
I haven't seen the entire interview, nor do I plan to - neither Rubin nor Shapiro are commentators I am a fan of - so will confine myself to the short clip and not address any wider points Shapiro might have been making. Although Twitter predictably reacted as though Shapiro had suggested the elderly be abandoned to die, his point was that when deciding how much of the economy and people's long-term quality-of-life to sacrifice in preventing COVID-19 deaths, age has to be part of the calculation. His point is adjacent to arguments I made in an article from earlier this month weighing up the costs of sacrificing our freedom and the economy against the need to keep people safe, albeit focusing on age rather than personal liberty. This is an issue which can be debated ad nauseam, but the topic made me think of another issue glanced upon in my aforementioned article, about the occasional necessity of hypocrisy in stating a principle against applying it.
In my article, I made the following statement regarding the aggressive police enforcement of anti-sunbathing rules during the lockdown:
While sunbathing is unnecessary, when people are being as cautious and responsible as is rightly expected of them, sticking to the principle of separation even if performing a questionable activity, this is a case when it is right to have the rule, but also be cautious in enforcing it. Nobody is at risk from people driving to beauty spots or well-spaced sunbathers. Unless the number of people doing so becomes critical - and the rule is there to discourage that from happening - a more conscientious view should be taken to let them be.
Shapiro's comments are, in a more oblique sense, circling a similar point. It is of course necessary that the state be seen to value all life equally. The idea of government agencies publicly picking and choosing who gets to live or die is abhorrent and set a terrifying precedent should a racist government come to power and decide to make its evaluation based on an arbitrary factor like skin colour, for instance. In practice, though, when allocated limited resources or judging how much damage to do to society and the economy in exchange for keeping people safe, the circumstances and contexts of a life have to be taken into account when making the calculation.
It is sometimes vital to have a law or rule as a statement of principle, yet only apply it in the loosest sense. It is essential that the law never be seen to judge any one person or group as more worthy of life than another, yet in deciding how and when to lift the lockdown, for instance, there are good reasons in practice why one should be more cautious when facing a virus predominantly harming young people (those most able to contribute to the rebuilding of the economy after a devastating quarantine) compared to one mostly harming the elderly (unlikely to contribute significantly to rebuilding due to being less economically active and nearer the end of their natural lives).
Morally, of course one should save every life possible. I've been on the fence regarding the severity of the lockdown, but have moved more towards the 'regrettably necessary' side over the past few weeks. COVID-19 may be mostly fatal to the elderly, but it was undeniably right to give up some of our personal liberty and economic prosperity in order to protect them. Now that fatalities seem to be on the decline, albeit an unsteady one, it is also right that the age of those most affected play an unspoken part in working out the manner and speed of our withdrawal from quarantine.
This principle of necessary hypocrisy applies in a few other areas as well. One could argue that is is already being applied in the field of drugs policy. There is a strong argument for the legalisation of all drugs, but doing so might encourage wider drug use and have negative social and personal outcomes down the line. By keeping Class A drugs illegal, but enforcing the law in only a limited capacity - continuing to arrest large-scale dealers from organised crime, for instance - it could be argued that the law discourages a potentially damaging activity while not being so heavy-handed as to leave victims isolated and beyond help. Certainly when it comes to cannabis, widely used despite technically being illegal, the correct balance appears to have been struck.
The assisted suicide issue is another, more contentious example. An individual's autonomy over their own lives is an essential part of my belief system, but fully legalising assisted suicide carries a number of risks in terms of people choosing to die when treatment might yet help them, of unscrupulous manipulators coercing family members into dying for personal gain, for instance, or the conflict of interest and personal moral dilemma placed on doctors sworn to do no harm being asked to end somebody's life (not to mention unscrupulous doctors).
By keeping assisted suicide illegal, one avoids these ethical dilemmas and forces anyone considering the procedure to think twice before breaking the law. However, should a person decide to go ahead with it anyway, it is also imperative that prosecution only take place where there is a serious reason to believe immoral activity has taken place, e.g. coercion. Where someone is simply helping free a family member from a life of unendurable suffering, for instance, the law should willingly look the other way.
Hypocrisy is a profoundly unattractive quality, yet in a complex world it is occasionally as important to state a principle without necessarily acting on it. To admit this is to concede the fallibility of some of our most deeply-held values and the need to act in a way which challenges our desire to view ourselves as credible moral actors. That is also why it is so important. Whether in law or personal morality, a system can only be fair if it is flexible. Being open to beliefs being challenged is so essential in our development as individuals and as a society.
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