Resisting our Responsibility during Covid
Tags: Covid 19, Sartre, Beauvoir, Existentialism, Philosophy

Beauvoir’s Blomart, and Sartre’s Mathieu (from The Age of Reason) are characters obsessed with their freedom and responsibility who are thrust into existentially difficult situations and feel the appeal of deference. Both of them accept and consequently wrestle with, their freedom and responsibility. Mathieu explicitly takes freedom as the central value of his life. Yet he is jealous, or at least admiring, of his old friend who had tied his destiny to the communist party, thinking: “He had joined up, he had renounced his freedom, he was nothing but a soldier. And everything had been rendered unto him, even his freedom. He is freer than I”.

Similarly, when Blomart is conscripted into the second world war, his primary emotion is one of relief: “[Blomart] did not have to choose to want a thing: he wanted it. He was at one with himself. There were no questions to solve. The goal stood peacefully and clearly before him: victory against fascism”.

These two characters, filled with anguish at their total freedom and responsibility in their normal lives, dream of subsuming that freedom within the orderly lives of soldiers and party members. Matthieu's friend in the communist party tells himself that he does not have to answer to his own freedom, that his freedom has been “rendered unto him” by his superiors as a tool to use for a specific purpose, a purpose he didn’t choose. Blomart finds the life of a soldier relieving because he is given the grand goal of “victory against fascism” and all of his actions are justified in relation to it. In both cases, the underlying form of the escape is deference. Matthieu and Blomart dream of having their freedom taken away, of subsuming it into an overarching goal, identity, or authority which will issue clear edicts, set clear rules.

Now, in our current situation we are not exactly lacking in rules- can we use them to render us free of our responsibility?

The most obvious source of rules is the government. They tell you what you should and shouldn’t do down to very personal matters usually outside the bounds of governmental regulation (who you can meet, where you can meet them, how many people you can invite to your wedding etc…). Faced with this wealth of directives, it is perfectly possible to affirm them and follow them as moral fact. This could reasonably remove the anxiety and irrationality which stem from taking the responsibility for your actions upon your own shoulders.

When you are making a decision, you could simply refer to the government advice and act accordingly. Should I go to the pub? Should I meet my friends indoors? The government says I can, so yes. This kind of attitude might even allow you to say that Covid deaths are the government’s fault- that even if your actions lead to death, as long as you followed government advice, the blame would lie with them- not you. The issue is that assuming this attitude towards a set of guidelines that you didn’t set yourself is a direct repudiation of your own freedom.

Of course, it isn’t a problem in itself that people are following government advice. Actually, the fact that many people have followed the advice- even under an attitude of deference- has doubtless saved many lives. And yet, the UK government has frequently contradicted its own rulings. During the summer, while discouraging people from breaking social distancing in certain spheres, they encouraged pubs and restaurants to open and fill their tables, especially with the eat out to help out the scheme. If you had previously managed to bury your anguish at your own responsibility through abdicating to the government’s authority, this contradiction (and many others like it) should have made you question your deference.

On the one hand, you know that Covid can be a deadly disease, that it spreads best in non-ventilated conditions like those in many pubs and restaurants and that it is your responsibility not to be a danger to others. On the other, the rules which you are following are suddenly offering the opposite edict, while purporting to retain the same justification (i.e, keeping people safe). What can we learn from this contradiction?

The fact that we see a contradiction here shows that we took the rule-maker as having reasons for their rules. While we were deferring to the government to guide our behavior, we did so on the implicit assumption that they were following reasons that we would assent to if they were made transparent. The contradiction shows that this is not the case, that the real reasons behind the rules are confused or inherently flawed.

The truth is that we can only follow moral rules that we take ourselves as having reasons to share. It is an illusion to think that we can follow a set of rules without being responsible for their outcome because in following them, we are choosing to act as if they are true.

It is this reason/rule interaction which ultimately shows us that deference is no real option. It is impossible to lose your responsibility in a set of rules. You cannot blame the government for the outcome of your actions if you chose to follow their rules in the first place. Further, this point holds even for those who were never inspired to adopt the government’s rules to begin with. You might defer in a similar way to the fact that your friends or contemporaries act in a certain way… but in that situation, it would still be down to you to show that conformity is a morally relevant motivation.

We do not follow rules without a reason, and it is always our responsibility to act for the reasons we take to be right. Blomart and Mathieu realise that there is something wrong with craving deference, it isn’t possible for them to lose themselves in the roles of soldier and party member because doing so would mean rejecting their own freedom. They could not help but be conscious of the fact that they were lying to themselves. It would only be possible for us to shift blame to the creators of external rules if those rules directly governed our lives, as physical laws do to objects. But rules set by other people do not work this way- there is an irreducible space between the rules and ourselves, a gap that can only be crossed by our assent. In other words, for rules to apply to you, you must in some sense agree to them yourself. The rules that you follow might perfectly match those of the government, or cohere with the behaviour of your friends, but they must hold up to your own justification. Deference then is not the answer. You cannot help but use your own freedom to defer, therefore you never truly shift responsibility.

It looks like we only have one option left: to affirm our own freedom and the freedom of others.