Caring for Others is Your Responsibility
Against Hobbes; Against Self-Interest
My wife is a healthcare worker. She’s an inpatient occupational therapist at a level-one trauma hospital. During the pandemic, when it was all hands on deck, all techs, aids, practitioners, physicians, nurses, and specialists—clinicians of any stripe, were mobilized to handle the carnage in any way possible, within their specialty or not. For example, my wife, who is not a nurse, was trained to support the nursing staff with their needs as the inpatient population swelled.
At one point, my wife was helping to put corpses in body bags.
I was a vocal advocate for preventative measures and mitigating the spread, including avoiding indoor gatherings, social distancing when required to be in public, and, yes, masking. Because my wife was literally handling the dead, and I had a weakened immune system from chemotherapy, our family took the virus very seriously. I used our family’s experience to make the point that we do not wear masks to protect ourselves, or at least not only to protect ourselves, but we wear masks to protect others, to prevent unwittingly spreading the virus we may be carrying, even if asymptomatic.
I’ll never forget reading a social media comment on a news article that was making the same point about masking for others: “It’s not my responsibility to protect others,” the commenter stated.
Sometimes in philosophy, we defer to some sort of brute force argument. At least that’s how I’d frame it. Maybe an appeal to common sense is better. And here, we have to move carefully because of what we’ve learned of the world, at least viewed through the lens of our scientific understanding, the world is far from common sense.
I’m not insulting my fellow humans that we lack common sense, though maybe we do, I’m saying that the fundamental building blocks of the world may be vibrating strings, and that, I would venture, seems not to be common sense at all.
In the philosophy of science, there is a counter-argument to using things like common sense to suggest truth. Sometimes, we’ll think of things like the elegance of a theory, how the pieces fit together just right; or its ability to explain more than the phenomenon under examination. Consider an appeal to the simplicity of a theory as evidence for its truth. This is a popular understanding in the general public. How many times have you heard that the simpler answer is often the correct one? In philosophy of science, we’d push back: What makes us think the world is simple? We must pre-suppose the simplicity of the world to prefer simpler scientific theories as guides to the truth.
Relying on common sense and certain theoretical virtues to prefer some theories over others requires first arguing that our perceptions and judgments are guides to the truth. This comes up a lot in epistemology, a branch of philosophy concerned with how we form beliefs and justify them.
One view suggests that our intuitions, what seems to us to be true, is a reliable guide in pursuit of the truth. The philosophers of science would resist this notion in justifying scientific beliefs—remember those vibrating strings. In what world are vibrating strings, quantum fields, or light being both a particle and a wave considered common sense? But what about in day-to-day circumstances? Does something striking us as correct weigh in favor of its correctness?
In other words, some things just feel true. Can we trust that feeling?
One way to back up a view like that is to appeal to evolution: We’ve adapted to our environments for hundreds of thousands of years, and wouldn’t it confer an evolutionary advantage to have reliable access to the world? If evolution is about selecting for fitness in an environment, wouldn’t we be less fit to our environments if we didn’t perceive the world as it is?
One of my favorite examples of an appeal to common sense comes from the 20th-century philosopher G.E. Moore. Addressing skepticism about whether we could ultimately give a definitive argument defending an external, mind-independent world, that is, what most of us would just call “reality,” Moore said famously, “I’ll prove there is an external world,” lifting one hand, “Here is a hand,” Moore said. Raising his second hand, “And here is another.”
Let’s go slow here: Does a world exist outside of our own minds? Can we somehow prove without question that there is a world out there, with us in it? Moore says, yes, here is a hand, and here is another.
My “here is a hand” common sense view, or one of them, is related to my argument about masking: Not only for ourselves but also for others. In other words, I take it as a basic belief, an intuition, something that just seems true to me that of our fundamental responsibilities, responsibilities we have simply by dint of being people, one is exercising consideration for others.
We could have interesting conversations about ethical theories giving a foundation to this responsibility or governing its application, but before we examine with theory—and don’t worry, I’m not going to do that here!—I am willing to simply accept the premise: We have a basic responsibility to consider others.
Like intuitions, I am not sure how to convince you of this. And like the commenter some years ago who replied, “I don’t have a responsibility to protect others,” I gather that is their intuition: we do not have a fundamental responsibility to others. Perhaps their “here is a hand” belief is something like egoism or self-preservation above all.
That was essentially Thomas Hobbes’ view: We are locked in a war of all, against all. Self-preservation ruled in Hobbes’ view, and self-preservation in an environment of limited resources leads to competition, hence, to the hypothesized war. For Hobbes, it wasn’t necessarily actual war that would rule our lives, but the insidiousness of the threat of war that would reign in the “state of nature,” what Hobbes considered to be a pre-political state ruled by self-preservation and competition. Government, a political state, was therefore needed to counter the war while protecting self-preservation.
In the state of nature, there was no security that someone wouldn’t just come and steal your shit. That was the idea. The war of all, against all, was this constant threat. Though, Hobbes put it more eloquently. In the state of nature, “Man's life was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short."
Hobbes took us to be ultimately self-centered, and there was no assurance that we would be safe from each other, leading to mistrust. The reasonable thing to do is to form a government, a “Sovereign,” powerful enough to enforce agreements made among people that we would not attack each other. The primary role of the Sovereign is to protect us, but what it protects us from is each other.
The view of humanity may be grim in Hobbes’s view, but I don’t think it is rare. How many people do you know who may hold to a view like this? That our Gd-given right is to our own self-preservation, people are ultimately in it for themselves, and people are generally not to be trusted.
My view of the world is fundamentally cooperative. I accept the premise that we have a base responsibility to consider others. I resist the idea that we are fundamentally self-interested, and if given the chance, we’d do what it took to protect our self-preservation, even at the expense of others. From this position of interdependence and community, I am so deeply bothered by the incoming Trump administration.
These guys look like Hobbes’ pre-political state: We are governed by self-interest, people are not to be trusted, and if given a chance, we’d attack someone else to amass more resources or gain more power. Our natual right of self preservation justifies this behavior.
I see Trumpism as a “better get yours,” and there’s only so much to go around. A wicked, selfish, self-interested view of morality that sees the government’s role as little more than keeping us from killing each other, and even then, our natural state is so corrupt that the deference to government overrides the means by which it maintains the contract among the subjects. In other words, “Some folk may need killing,” said Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson of North Carolina. I think that’s part of this worldview.
Perceived weakness is disdained on this view. If self-preservation and competition reign, strength is a virtue, but a particular brand of strength: a hyper-masculinity of unchecked militarism and strongman tough talk used to intimidate in service of grabbing up what you can before anyone else gets a chance to. Coalitions are only as good as their weakest links, regulations that get in the way of amassing wealth, resources, or power are to be done away with, and those who have the fewest resources must be policed because they are the most likely to come for your stuff, because of base self preservation.
In the end, my natural pre-political state is quite different from Hobbes’. Where he sees competition, I see cooperation, and where he sees self preservation, I see thriving in community.