Managing Individual Responsibility During a Pandemic
Just this month, my sister moved out to begin her freshman year in Georgia. Among my parents’ greatest concerns was the state’s response - or lack thereof - to COVID-19. Truth be told, we were spoiled as Californians; once stay-at-home orders were issued in mid-March, our world was brought to a screeching halt for quite some time. While we may have the highest case numbers in the nation, which makes sense given our population as a state, other residents as individuals do their due diligence in curbing the spread of COVID-19 in public places. We wear masks, distance ourselves from others, and try to stay home as much as possible. In the deep South, where my sister will be staying for the next four years, the discussion of COVID-19 is rife with controversy - she recently sent me Yelp reviews ranting about mask policies at a local Trader Joe’s, with one impassioned woman calling the pandemic a “plandemic” - a creative play on words, but one that would be met with disagreement and ridicule where I live.
As the son of South Korean immigrants, the discussion surrounding our country’s sluggish and fragmented response to the pandemic is also widened to the scope of the world. South Korea’s comparative success in preventing COVID-19 from taking root in its bustling cities and quiet countrysides cast the country’s government into the global limelight, an effective reference point for my parents to return to whenever they wanted to criticize me for my American-ness. I see South Korea’s preventive measures deeply rooted in enforceable government policy and social norms; contact tracing on mobile devices and mass testing stand out to me the most, especially because effective implementation would be met with strife here in the United States. Our discussions about privacy have reached the political forefront ever since the prevalence of technology and surveillance efforts spurred by 9/11. The intoxicating freedom we enjoy here is in diametric opposition to individual mandates on behavior, like installing a contact tracing app or following preventive guidelines. Whatever liberty we think we have, we desperately try to hold onto. This isn’t even mentioning the diversity of opinion and sheer size of America that would make widespread testing and individual regulation difficult to carry out. I believe this disparity to also be cultural. Mask-wearing is commonplace in East Asia, so the commonly cited reasons that Americans refuse to wear masks, like their “right to breathe” and the uncomfortable feeling associated with wearing masks, are essentially moot in places like South Korea.
However, stepping away from this comparative analysis, I spent much of my summer trying to understand the visions of freedom espoused by prominent political philosophers since the Enlightenment. While thinkers like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke were more concerned with with how we should shape our governments as reflections of their interpretations of human nature, and Tocqueville delved into the social state of America in the 19th century, I found the work of John Stuart Mill to be the most apposite in today’s national dialogue, amidst perhaps the greatest public health crisis of our generation. In Mill’s 1859 essay, On Liberty, he discusses the primary principle that guides the rest of his political philosophy as it is articulated in the rest of the text:
“That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others… The only part of the conduct of anyone, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.”
On first impression, this explanation seems quite comprehensive, if not absolute. It also attacks the central tension found in On Liberty: the historically reoccuring tug-of-war between individuals who wish to preserve their liberty, and the government. Yet, there are many loose ends in the explanation of the harm principle that are left unanswered in the remainder of the essay. The first issue is that what exactly constitutes harm is not fully articulated by Mill. The second is that given this uncertainty, there is no reliable metric to judge whether or not a government should find itself involved in a situation. While Mill attempts to apply his political philosophy to issues of his time, like alcoholism, the importation of opium, fornication, and gambling, he does not address individual regulation of behavior when an entire population is at stake. Scenarios involving all of society aren’t limited to a pandemic. War, insurrection, and famine are three examples where concerted individual behavior may produce a net good for society that could not be achieved merely through more effective governance. This makes the discussion of controlling individual behavior during COVID-19 a grey area when contextualizing the issue in Mill’s political philosophy.
Yet, there are compelling reasons to believe that individual behavior would be regulated during a pandemic within a Millian system. Given that COVID-19 is deadly and easily transmissible - ignoring the veracity of a “plandemic” - Mill would most likely believe that regulation would be permitted as that would preserve opportunities for more people to see that their liberty is fully realized. This is another point of differentiation from Mill’s applications. Soliciting prostitutes, getting intoxicated, and gambling all take conscious actions to engage in, but it is through inaction that COVID-19 becomes more pervasive, thus diminishing the freedom and health of others. So long as legislation is carried out equitably, and regulation is enforced in such a way that it would not intrude on the faculties of individuals in private life, Mill would likely agree with these preventive measures, as they fit within the bounds of the harm principle. In a country like the United States where the debates concerning freedom are always timely, the COVID-19 pandemic has introduced new practices seemingly designed to restrict one’s freedom, but collective efforts made as a unified community affirm that the individual freedoms once enjoyed pre-pandemic will ultimately see their return sooner. In their current state, individual mandates to prevent COVID-19’s spread remain disparate across states and municipalities. It is a reality that scholars of Mill would object against, endorsing a mandate on individual behavior as the answer to this archetypal Millian problem. Though the principle of harm articulated in On Liberty may not ease the tensions seen between individual liberties and government intervention alone, John Stuart Mill’s vision of freedom is one that must be amplified in today’s sociopolitical conversations.
