34 Time March 30, 2020
^
Scarcity
predictably gives
rise to hoarding,
denying other
people their share
of finite goods
Disease quarantines force us to weigh
the needs of others against our own.
And the outcome can be ugly
BY JEFFREY KLUGER
THE GREATER
GOOD
Tongues clucked when word goT ouT ThaT
a Missouri man whose daughter had tested positive
for COVID-19 broke quarantine in early March to
attend a father-daughter school dance with her sis-
ter. The school was closed the following Monday for
a hospital-grade cleaning.
A coronavirus quarantine is not easy. It amounts
to two weeks of house arrest for a disease you may not
have. Your fortnight of confinement is done entirely
in the service of others, protecting them from possi-
ble infection. A situation like that causes two of our
more primal impulses—selfishness and altruism—
to bump up hard against each other. “I think these
quarantine issues are going to put many people in a
moral conundrum,” says Jonathan Haidt, professor
of ethical leadership at New York University’s Stern
School of Business.
Haidt can speak with particular authority. When
he talked with TIME, he was in the sixth day of his
own 14-day quarantine, having been exposed to the
coronavirus by an infected individual during a talk he
gave about his new book, The Coddling of the Amer-
ican Mind. He plans to honor every day of his viral
sentence. But why?
“We all do care about the welfare of other people —
although inconsistently,” he says. “We also all care
about our reputations—very consistently. I would
truly feel guilty if I passed the virus on to anybody
else. I would feel great shame that people knew that
it was me who broke the quarantine.”
“Shame is huge,” agrees Steven Pinker, professor
of psychology at Harvard University and author, most
recently, of Enlightenment Now. “We carry around in
our heads the expectation that anything we do might
leak out. It’s that public opprobrium for misbehavior
that keeps us in line.”
But shame can be overcome, and if you’re secre-
tive about things, no one even has to know you mis-
behaved. Yes, you’re under quarantine, but you’re not
under surveillance. If you slip out for dinner, who’s
going to spot you? Acting altruistically takes some
moral muscle.
Haidt identifies three sets of circumstances that
tend to drive people and nations toward either selfish
or altruistic behavior. The first is some kind of danger
from outside: an attack by a common enemy. “That
makes people band together,” he says. Consider the
lines at enlistment centers the morning after Pearl
Harbor and the rationing people tolerated during
the long span of a four-year war. Consider the simi-
lar lines that spontaneously formed at blood-donor
centers in New York City on 9/11.
However, when the attack comes not from a
human enemy but from a virus or other pathogen,
moral stress-cracks form in the community. “Diseases
do not bring us together,” Haidt says. “They can push
us apart because of the nature of contagion.”
Fear of infection can mean fear of others, and
when combined with ignorance can bring out the
sublimely ugly. Think of the shaming and shunning
of lepers, of the homophobic hatred given full voice
during the early years of the AIDS epidemic.
Third on the list of social stressors is any kind
of deprivation—especially in the case of famine or
shortage of other basics. “Scarcity and starvation
activate the mindset of hoarding and deception and
dishonesty,” Haidt says. “So when masks are in short
supply, many people feel a need to get some.”
It’s not just masks: whether in the face of a creep-
ing pandemic or a megastorm warning, supermar-
kets are quickly emptied of staple foods, batteries,
and ever and always toilet paper, far more than the
circumstances call for in most cases. Since all such
CORONAVIRUS
ROGER KISBY—REDUX; ILLUSTRATION BY BROWN BIRD DESIGN FOR TIME
