THE rIGHT DOES NOT BELIEVE IN NEIGHBORS:

As Rod Dreher noted, it is embarrassing that Andrew Cuomo of all people has succeeded in positioning himself as more pro-life than Rusty Reno. The current crisis, in fact, affords Christians an unprecedented opportunity to persuasively articulate our defense of life to a culture that might at last be ready to listen. For the first time in decades, our materialistic society has been put on pause, and people are looking around and asking themselves, "What is this all for? What is the value of human life? Am I willing to sacrifice my freedom to protect my neighbor? Can I sacrifice some comfort to protect life?" As Christians, we can use this opportunity to seize the megaphone and remind those around us of the transcendent value of human life and the frivolity of the kind of "freedom" that our culture so values. Or, we can squander this moment and go down in history as those who stood callously by and said that a few hundred thousand more American deaths is a small price to pay for maintaining our standard of living.

Now, at this moment, a chorus of objections will be raised.

Some will protest that there won't be hundreds of thousands of deaths, and anyone who says so is a fear-monger. My hope too is that the death toll will be relatively low, but if so, it will only be because we listened to the so-called "fear-mongers" or because we got incredibly lucky. The vast majority of the epidemiological data points to a grim scenario in the absence of dramatic intervention. To be sure, models are sometimes wrong and experts are not omniscient, but we rarely hesitate to cut our beach vacations short when a major hurricane--something far less predictable than an epidemic curve--is on its way, so it's hard to see the rational ground for blithely ignoring the threats of this other force of nature--infinitesimally smaller, perhaps, but far more deadly.

More substantively, perhaps, many will protest that it is unfair to characterize this as a tradeoff between economics and human life--even if that is exactly the way that many have carelessly articulated it, not least our own President. After all, economics is all about the preservation and flourishing of human life, or at least it's supposed to be. It has no plausible justification except to promote life, health, and well-being; as John Ruskin argued powerfully in Unto This Last?, in the last assessment, there is "no wealth but life," and our political economy must be ordered accordingly.

So what does this mean for our situation? If people lose jobs, they lose their livelihood. If they lose their livelihoods, they are much more likely to get sick and die--perhaps at some point far in the future, but still, why should we save 500,000 people now if it means losing five million newly-impoverished Americans to drugs, despair, or starvation in the next ten years. Can we knowingly sacrifice some lives now in order to protect other goods, including perhaps more lives later?

This is, I fear, something of an academic question at the current juncture--if public health experts are to be believed, this is not really a question of whether we lose jobs or lose lives, but whether we lose lots of jobs and few lives, or lots of jobs and lots of lives. It is difficult to believe that the economy would continue to properly function in the scenario of unmitigated spread toward which so many contrarians like Reno are goading us.

People are not going to casually ride subways and go out for dinner if hospitals are overflowing and people are dying in the streets. If proactive government action (which oddly now counts as "panic" in the eyes of many) didn't shut down the businesses, real, society-wide panic would likely do so soon enough, and in considerably more disorderly fashion. Still, it has been long since we as a society have stared the prospect of mass death in the face, and many, understandably, cannot imagine or believe that we could find ourselves in that position in a few weeks time. So let us ask the question: if we could choose between losing lots of lives now and losing lots of jobs now, how should we choose? It is an important and serious moral question, one that should not be lightly dismissed. How might we begin to answer it?

The first thing we must do is get clear on what question exactly is being asked of us. Reno seeks to frame the issue in terms of the Christian duty to be fearless in the face of death, but this, I think, rather misses the point. The call to social distancing is an appeal first and foremost not to self-love, but to love of neighbor. Even if you are young and healthy and more than happy to endanger your life by going about your daily routine, that does not give you a right to endanger others, which is precisely what an invisible, often asymptomatic virus may cause you to do. Christians are called to faith and hope, to be sure, but also to love. Traditionally, Christians have taught that the sixth commandment imposes on us not merely an obligation not to kill but to do whatever we reasonably can to preserve life: "The duties required in the sixth commandment are, all careful studies, and lawful endeavors, to preserve the life of ourselves and others..." (Westminster Larger Catechism, Q. 135). So the proper framing of this question is: "is it more loving to our neighbor to increase the number of people who will get sick and die in the near term, or to decrease our economic well-being in the near-term (thus, presumably, increasing sickness and death in the long run)?"

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