Risk Reconsidered

At a distance of almost six years, I recently looked back on some thoughts that I briefly noted in writing around the time that COVID-19 (which, beyond this point, I will call “the virus”) first came to widespread public attention. I have organized here those parts of my thoughts which seem to have some ongoing relevance. In this process of doing this, one unifying theme stood out: the balancing of risk.

Relative Perception of Risk

Our perception of the severity of a risk to our life or health seems to vary based on the level of risk to which we have become accustomed. Most of our preindustrial ancestors likely lived with much greater risk of death on a daily basis (from disease, animals, weather, etc.) than what most of us faced during the virus’ most dramatically active times; what was a time of elevated risk for us likely would have been a safer-than-average time for them. 

Furthermore, it is probable that a century or more prior to this virus, we would scarcely have recognized it as anything distinct from common respiratory illnesses, because those who became severely ill with this novel disease were usually those who would not have been able to be kept alive many years ago at all (for instance, those with cancer, heart disease, and diabetes). Most of the deaths from the virus likely only happened because those in poor health were increasingly able to stay alive. In this sense, they were the victims of our own success as humans in medical development. 

All of this goes to show that, since we humans are, in general, at such a low level of overall risk at this point in history, risk appears more exceptional, and our tolerance for risk diminishes. 

Inevitability of Risk in Ordinary Life 

I was among those who had an extraordinarily low-risk tolerance. Until the time of the virus, I had been excessively dedicated to physical safety. For instance, I never used to understand risky activities such as tightrope walking. As absurd as it may sound, I saw those sorts of things as sins. I reasoned that it was gravely irresponsible to risk one’s own life for mere entertainment. However, when I saw this way of thinking showing up in other people’s response to the virus, the mirror was held up to me, and I suddenly understood that all entertainment - indeed, all activity of any kind - involves some danger, and in order to do anything, we are going to have to put ourselves, and sometimes other people, in some danger. This is why there is no such thing as a “right not to get sick;” we would have to avoid almost every activity of life if there were, because getting sick can happen through an unfathomably vast number of channels.

I realized that normally-functioning humans never live as if trying to save every life – no matter the financial cost or opportunity cost – were worthwhile. If we did live that way, we would not take any elective trips, because someone could be killed in the process of traveling. We would not spend any money on making our buildings or landscapes or clothes beautiful, because that money could be donated to healthcare research in order to develop treatments to save more lives. The list could go on.

More controversially, it occured to me that this same reasoning could be applied to tobacco smoking. I have no intention of taking up smoking myself, and I am not recommending that anyone make a very frequent practice of it. However, I do not believe smoking is always morally wrong, even though it is dangerous. Therefore, in a recent outdoor social situation, when a new acquaintance asked, “Do you mind if I smoke?,” I said I did not mind, because it could be considered “part of enjoying what the world has to offer.” As with many activities, risk is inevitable, and we must decide how much of that risk to accept. 

Even our activities done for the sake of others can still put people (beyond just ourselves) at risk. For instance, a person driving a car on the way to help someone could pass out, thus losing control of the car, and hit and kill someone. Again, perfect safety is not available to us; we simply cannot live an ordinary human life in this fallen world without putting ourselves and others in some degree of danger, so we have to make judgments about how much danger should reasonably be considered worthwhile to tolerate.

Prioritization of Values

It is worth pointing out that science may inform these judgments by showing us factual reality, but science does not have the capacity to tell us what to prioritize – it has no means by which to know what things in life are most valuable. As G.K. Chesterton wrote in the Illustrated London News on October 9th of 1909, “Science must not impose any philosophy, any more than the telephone must tell us what to say” (emphasis added). More than that, science cannot impose any philosophy, because it does not deal with that set of questions, and so we need to separately use the processes of philosophy to identify what is most valuable.

Further on the subject of identifying what is most valuable, it is worthwhile to point out another aspect what had been missing from my reasoning prior to the virus’ arrival: an awareness that all human activity is interrelated, and that stopping ordinary social, economic, and even medical, human activity does real harm to people, even if it may lessen one’s chances of catching a communicable disease. A case in point: we all live off of the economy (hence the phrase, "to make a living"), and thus economic health is not just a matter of prosperity, but ultimately of necessity and survival. 

A similar case is the use of masks. Even if masks could have an effect on the transmission of a disease, and further downstream in time, slightly diminish the number of deaths from the disease, it is still important to consider the likelihood that not seeing full faces is a hindrance to children’s development in speech and emotional intelligence, and that this hindrance in the most formative years might not be possible to fully remedy later, which also could have tragic rippling effects. 

The two examples immediately above – of economics and masks – demonstrate that the maxim “safety first” ultimately fails, because supporting one kind of safety will inevitably compromise safety of a different sort. Hence, we need a set of ordered priorities, or values in life, and having safety at the top of the list would defeat the purpose of the list. Not only that, but having survival at the top of the list also seems to defeat the purpose of the list, because it would amount to saying something like, “the purpose of life is to keep on living,” thus rendering the whole thing circular, and leaving unresolved the question of why we have our lives at all.

Parameters of Acceptable Risk

The great and wise Archbishop Charles Chaput once wrote a book entitled Things Worth Dying For. The virus pushed us to confront the question: are there any such things? I was granted a great blessing from the circumstances of the virus, since I, for one, came to realize that there were things worth dying for, and this unlocked the door of the cell of scrupulosity in which I had lived. At long last, I absorbed the reality that I could not perfectly protect myself or anyone else, and so I walked forward, free of the impossible burden of attempting to do so.

On the other side of the coin, it is true that not every good thing is always worth dying for. Even so, it is difficult to imagine why human beings would have been created at all, if the ability to work, to form meaningful relationships, and to enjoy some level of responsible recreation were worth indefinitely sacrificing, for the sake of merely remaining alive. That is why the rationale initially offered when the virus restrictions began – that of reducing the amount of human interaction temporarily, in order to prepare hospital capacity for a surge of patients – made a great deal of sense, at least in the abstract, but the rationale that became popular later – the idea that any activity that was not, strictly speaking, necessary, should be forbidden, because no one’s voluntary activity is worth more than someone’s life – did not make sense. The latter lacked a limiting principle, since we would never be able to eliminate all risk of death from voluntary activities.

Conclusion

I am not denying that there is such a thing as excessive endangerment. For instance, let us take my example from above of tightrope walking – someone who attempted to cross the Grand Canyon on their first attempt at tightrope walking, without prior practice and training, and for no other purpose than amusement, would indeed be sinning. Furthermore, I am not denying that directly attacking the life of an innocent person – as in the hypothetical case of deliberately trying to give the virus to a vulnerable person in order to kill them – is wrong. However, the amount of precaution to take in life is usually in the realm of trade-offs and “prudential judgements” (to borrow a well-worn phrase), rather than of obvious right and wrong, and being selective about which precautions to take is not, on its own, a direct attack on the life of anyone.