Beauvoir, Freedom, and COVID-19
THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS
BY WENDI ZHOU
By the beginning of April 2020, most states had imposed business closures and stay-at-home orders due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Just a few weeks later, however, conservative groups in Michigan staged an anti-lockdown protest with additional calls to supporters in other states to engage in similar action. Consequently, anti-lockdown protests have emerged all over the country, featuring mostly right-leaning protesters carrying signs with messages ranging from simple calls for the reopening of businesses such as barbershops and bars to more vehement cries such as “Give me liberty or give me death,” “My virus, my choice,” “Set us free,” or just the single word “Freedom.” Although it has been reported that these protests are funded and organized in large part by conservative networks whose substantial business connections would benefit from a speedy reopening of the economy, astroturfing allegations aside, we can still see that the majority of protesters are challenging laws aimed at promoting public safety during the pandemic in the name of “freedom”—for them specifically, the freedom people have to conduct their own lives as they please and, in simpler terms, to just “do what they want.”
The philosopher Simone de Beauvoir elaborates and challenges this simple conception of freedom, first of all by drawing a distinction between ontological and moral freedom. Whereas all humans are born with ontological freedom—a freedom arising out of the fact that we are not only our being but also our becoming—moral freedom is the recognition of this ontological freedom and the commitment to act to secure the liberation of others as well as oneself. In other words, moral freedom is the choice we have to enable the realization of everyone’s ontological freedom in a space free from humanly imposed oppression, where every individual can have enough power to make choices and avoid being “chang[ed] . . . into a thing” (Beauvoir 35). True collective freedom, in addition, is attained through action and, according to Beauvoir, “is embodied for [people] . . . in definite acts of behavior” (33).
So do the anti-lockdown protests count as an example of Beauvoir’s conception of realizing freedom? To me, the answer is no. First of all, it is clear that most people engaged in anti-lockdown protests come from a relatively privileged racial and economic group seeking less of moral freedom and more of just personal convenience—along the posters and signs demanding “freedom” and an end to government “tyranny,” some widely circulated messages include those such as “Open our bars,” “Stop ruining my senior year,” and the well-known “I want a haircut.” Beauvoir would say that this is not true freedom but rather self-interest, and that the goal of the protesters is not the continuing liberation of human beings but rather something along the lines of “property, the feeling of possession, capital, comfort, [and] moral security” (39). This becomes strikingly clear when juxtaposing the anti-lockdown protests with the Black Lives Matter protests in response to the death of George Floyd, where large groups consisting of not only black people, but people from many other identities as well, protested police brutality and racial injustice impacting a group of people more oppressed than the ones engaged in white-dominated protests against the lockdowns. In addition, by calling for a speedier reopening against the advice of public health experts, these protesters are in fact putting more people in danger, especially people from lower-income and minority backgrounds who have been hit harder by the coronavirus pandemic, health-wise and financially. After all, as Beauvoir says, “to be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future” (39). When we are making claims regarding our own “freedom” or lack of it, it is important to consider the freedom of others and whether we are freeing each other toward that open future rather than hold our own self-interest as the highest end.
Wendi Zhou is a sophomore at the University of Washington, majoring in History and Philosophy. You can reach her at wzhou1@uw.edu.