It occurs to me that Personal Responsibility is, ironically, a great way of avoiding responsibility for your own bad acts or lack of action. Like, if your worldview is, fundamentally, “anything bad that happens is the fault of the person it happens to,” you’re accepting two premises as true: 1) nothing you do that affects other people can ever be bad, and 2) the only time you should worry about something is if it affects you personally.
Did you refuse to give money to a homeless person, and as a result, they starve to death? They should have been more financially responsible!
Were you a homophobic dickhead who got a queer coworker fired? Sure, that might be mean, but if they can’t survive without a job, that’s hardly your fault.
Did you rape someone? I mean, okay, technically that was your fault, but like, what was the victim wearing? Were they flirty? Did they get drunk? Obviously the real problem isn’t the person who did the action, it’s the victim for not being responsible!
This is especially true the larger of a scale you’re looking at (people might accept that a mugger is responsible for the theft of a wallet, but systemic wage theft by a corporation is the fault of the workers for choosing to be employed by that company), and the more marginalized the victim is.
You’ll notice that the inverse of this is rarely true (ex: if you give money to a homeless person and it’s used to buy drugs, that is your fault, so you should never give any homeless person money out of fear that they might do drugs). And it’s an incredibly self-centered way of thinking, because under this framework, you have no obligation to help people whatsoever, and any suffering that occurs because of your inaction is not your fault.
So, in a pandemic, the Personal Responsibility folks are being extremely predictable:
if people get sick, that’s not my fault
I have no obligation to prevent people from getting sick
people getting sick is the fault of the people I interacted with, not mine for being part of that interaction (or: people getting sick is no one’s fault, there’s no way any of this could have been prevented, and certainly not by me)
