Responsibilities and Freedoms

If you have the responsibility to do something, then you obviously do not have the freedom to 'not' do it. That should go without saying.

That’s the underlying definition of responsibility. It’s not optional, it cannot be avoided.

We, of course, should try to minimize the number of intrinsic responsibilities in a society for the average person. That would be a good thing, we don’t want to overburden people. But because we are a collective group, there are always some inherent responsibilities. They are unavoidable.

It’s rather obvious that not traumatically interfering with other people’s lives is a core responsibility. Obviously, murder and theft are well known and well understood. But just walking around and pushing other people out of the way is not allowed either. 

So, it’s no surprise that infecting other people on purpose with a virus is considered wrong as well. Thus, there is a basic and inherent responsibility that all people should do whatever is necessary to not go around infecting others with diseases that they currently have. If the state of the art for avoiding doing this is isolation, masks, and vaccines, and these have been shown to be effective, then the responsibility is clear.

And to make it a little more difficult, if, for some people, it is impossible to know if they have the virus or not, and if the virus is also quite common, then pretty much everyone has an inherent responsibility to assume they might have it and then do their absolute best in not passing it around to others.

It would be nice if everyone knew this and obeyed it instinctively, but rather sadly in some societies, large swaths of the population are confused about their responsibilities as its members. Thus, we see that it has become necessary to remind them of their responsibilities to the others around them, through legal means, rather than just letting them figure it out on their own. It would have been way better if only a tiny fraction of people had forgotten or ignored their responsibilities, but when it is more than just a single-digit percentage point, governments are obligated to intervene in order to prevent large-scale disasters.