The individual comes first

The argument

The only way to slow down the spread of the coronavirus is through cooperation. Governments can only mandate so many measures for safety, but the rest of the spread must be stopped through respecting guidelines such as social distancing, staying inside, handwashing, etc. The gap between what can be mandated and what must be volunteered is what makes the situation revealing. Compliance with most of these measures cannot be observed or enforced at the moment it matters, so what people do is decided by what they are willing to do rather than by what they can be made to do. As many people disrespect or disregard guidelines to stop the spread of COVID-19, it has revealed that a large part of the human population will put their own interests above the good of the group. The structure of the choice is what gives the observation its force: each individual act of non-compliance carries a small and immediate benefit to the person making it, while its cost is spread thinly across everyone else and cannot be traced back to them. Under those conditions, what a person chooses shows which side they weigh more heavily once the two are genuinely separated. Some large corporations are not providing their employees with personal protective equipment, people are not social distancing, and other behaviors are proving that personal gain is more important than the virus-inhibiting measures that are being inputted by governments. The examples span very different scales, which is part of the point — the same calculation appears in an organisation's decision about expenditure and in an individual's decision about an afternoon, which suggests a general disposition rather than a local failure of one kind of actor. Humans are inherently self-serving and will choose personal advancement or enjoyment over societal advantages. What the pandemic supplied, on this argument, was not a change in that disposition but a situation transparent enough to expose it, because the conflict between individual and collective interest was unusually direct and unusually visible.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Though there are many people disrespecting guidelines, many more are remaining quarantined, and in general, people are doing everything they can to prevent the virus from spreading. A majority are showing the ability to band together in the face of crisis, not the opposite.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] This is not disputed, and it is what undercuts the conclusion: transmission did slow in many places, which required exactly the widespread voluntary compliance the premise says was necessary. [Rejecting P2] Visibility is not frequency. Breaches were reported because they were exceptional, while survey and mobility data over the same period showed large majorities staying home, cancelling plans and accepting sustained personal cost with little enforcement behind it. Inferring that humans are inherently self-serving from a conspicuous minority reverses the evidence — and treats a claim about human nature as though a few months of behaviour could settle it.