During the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States in March 2020, I ordered Chinese take-out via a delivery app. I felt really conflicted about my decision to do so. On the one hand, it seemed like a good way to boost the flagging economy and support local businesses struggling to survive under shelter-in-place orders. Delivery drivers were depending on the money they made from such jobs, and I planned on tipping very well. And during a time of isolation from many of the things that usually made my life exciting, I desperately wanted a treat and a change of pace.
On the other hand, I felt like I was unfairly outsourcing my own risk to others: restaurant workers in small kitchens were putting themselves at high risk of contracting a potentially deadly virus for the benefit of people like me, and I was asking someone else to risk entering the restaurant to collect the order on my behalf. Gig economy apps that hire workers as contractors to avoid paying for health insurance are exploitative in the best of times and seemed much worse during a viral pandemic. And I didn’t need to order lo-mein or General Tso’s tofu to feed myself; I had plenty of time to cook and a stockpile of shelf-stable groceries.
I wrote in my journal at the time that I “agonized over whether to order take-out (and had two stress dreams about it in one night). I feel serious moral fatigue—constantly being worried about hurting others through my decisions in ways I can’t understand. Every decision seems very high stakes and no one knows how to assess any of this.” Like many philosophers, I’m inclined to over-analyze things and sometimes struggle with indecision; surely some of my anxiety stemmed from these personality traits. But I think that the stress I felt also illustrates an important and underappreciated feature of our moral lives that has become both more frequent and more obvious during the pandemic.
I call this feature everyday moral stress, by which I mean the various ways in which ordinary, low-stakes moral decision-making in a deeply flawed world can lead to distress, demoralization, desensitization, and denigration of your moral capacities. Moral stress can be beneficial in small doses. Grappling with tough decisions, imposing risks of harm on others, and balancing seemingly incommensurable values should be difficult; feeling pained about this is a sign that your moral faculties are functioning well. But like ordinary stress, moral stressors become overwhelming and counterproductive when they are pervasive and unavoidable. I’ll address three sources of moral stress, all of which are present in ordinary times but have been greatly amplified by the coronavirus pandemic.
One common source of everyday moral stress is uncertainty about what to do. Empirical uncertainty about the facts—about how the virus spreads, or vaccine efficacy, or the dangers of long COVID—makes it challenging to properly reason about what to do and be confident that you’ve made a sensible decision. Even harder is moral uncertainty over which values to prioritize. The angst I felt ordering takeout is echoed throughout my early pandemic journal, as I grappled with questions like whether the social and relational benefits of gathering with friends outdoors were worth the cost of unknown risks to our health. Throughout the pandemic I have been exhausted, burned out, and frequently demoralized. And while I have remained as vigilant as I can be in assessing these risks, I can see the appeal of giving up: how much easier would it be to just do whatever I wanted, to quit striving to make ethical decisions in an unethical world, to stop being besieged by doubt and anxiety? I suspect that this is a driving force behind the attitudes of some people who are “vaxxed and done:” people who tried hard to make good choices and be responsive to ever-changing reasons, but who are so worn down after nearly two years of continual uncertainty and sacrifice that they’ve decided to stop worrying and return to normal life.
Of course, normal life has its own share of both empirical and moral uncertainty. We often don’t fully understand what many of our daily decisions actually entail. As the celestial being Michael observes on The Good Place, “these days just buying a tomato at a grocery store means that you are unwittingly supporting toxic pesticides, exploiting labor, contributing to global warming. Humans think that they’re making one choice, but they’re actually making dozens of choices they don’t even know they’re making.” The relentless complexity of the moral considerations we must grapple with may lead us to give up, and to stop trying to make ethical consumer choices in a world in which the impact of our decisions is far from clear: to just buy the tomato, or the palm oil, or the cow’s milk, or the chicken breast. I worry that the pandemic has amplified and exacerbated this tendency.
A second source of everyday moral stress is the moral residue that comes from acting in a way that inevitably imposes some sort of harm. This might take the form of a moral dilemma, or a situation in which you’re morally required to do two incompatible things, thus ensuring that you’ll do wrong no matter what. For example, as this satirical letter claims, we can make a good case that “you’re wrong for supporting either in-person or virtual school” during the pandemic. There’s an active debate among philosophers about whether such dilemmas exist, but moral residue of the sort I have in mind doesn’t require dilemmas in this strict sense. Even if you are convinced that your action is morally right, you may still feel deeply distressed if it causes harm or violates an important value.
The pandemic turned many formerly morally neutral behaviors into activities that inevitably impose harm. Something as ordinary as acquiring groceries in the early stages of the pandemic became deeply morally fraught: shopping in-person increases store crowding and thus virus transmissibility; using curbside pick-up shifts risks to underpaid employees; stocking up on groceries ensures that you won’t have to venture out if you get sick but risks not leaving enough for others. Morally sensitive people should be concerned when their actions impose harm on others. But realizing that nearly everything you do imposes harm can lead to feelings of pervasive sadness and guilt, or a sense of alienation from your own actions, or a re-assessment of whether you really are the decent person you take yourself to be.
In my case, widespread moral residue desensitized me to some of the harms I was contributing to as the pandemic wore on. When I first started using curbside pickup for my groceries in the spring of 2020, I was keenly aware of the risks store employees were taking, and so grateful to them that I routinely violated the store policy against tipping their employees, giving the person who brought the groceries out to my car $20 cash to thank them. But after six months of living in a world in which every consumer decision I made negatively impacted essential workers in one way or another, these risks started to seem more normalized, and I started giving them an extra $5 or $10. After a few more months, I stopped giving cash tips altogether. As with everyday moral stress stemming from uncertainty, this is not unique to the pandemic. Most of the consumer decisions we make in a modern capitalist economy either directly impose or make us complicit in harms of one sort or another, and recognizing this can lead us to feel distressed, alienated, or desensitized. The pandemic has widened the sphere of actions that impose inevitable harms of the sort that leaves moral residue.
The third source of everyday moral stress is a low-stakes version of moral injury. Among psychologists, moral injury refers to the harm to your sense of self and moral agency that stems from acting in ways that violate your moral values. The concept was first applied to soldiers during war and has since been expanded to other domains, including healthcare workers facing institutional constraints that lead them to act in ways they believe to be wrong. Frontline hospital workers during COVID-19 are especially likely to grapple with severe moral injury as hospitals become overwhelmed; overworked and under-resourced staff are unable to adequately respond to each patient’s needs, and likely feel that they are violating their own moral and professional values.
I think that the concept of moral injury can be expanded to cover more prosaic violations of our values as well. These everyday moral injuries will not shatter your sense of self or lead to serious trauma in the way that severe moral injuries can. But when they are widespread and repeated, they can nevertheless lead to smaller harms to your moral agency—not broken bones, but repetitive stress injuries. For example, I cancelled my subscription to Amazon Prime in 2018, since the company engages in unethical business practices that I don’t want to support. In April 2020, faced with the tantalizing prospect of getting curbside pickup from Whole Foods—and thus acquiring the fancy vegan cheeses I craved that weren’t being sold at other stores—I signed up for the service again. It’s clearer than ever to me that supporting Amazon is unethical. But I’m still a Prime member, and I feel a sense of guilt or discomfort that gently pushes on my conception of myself as a good person every time I place an order.
Making ethical choices is challenging in the best of circumstances. Pre-pandemic, I occasionally bought fast-fashion online even though I believe that doing so is not ethically ideal for someone in my position (who already has enough clothes to wear, and who can afford to spend more on other brands if needed). The pandemic restricted my options in ways that made it harder for me to resist such purchases: in-person shopping at my local thrift store was unavailable or unsafe; I was spending all my time at home and thus really desired another pair of sweatpants; online shopping was one of the few luxuries available to me in lockdown. I suspect that most of us—at least when we’re brutally honest with ourselves—are in similar positions: we generally do lots of things that we think are at least somewhat unethical, and we’ve done this more frequently in the last couple of years as COVID-19 restructures our world. It would not be surprising if this leads to damage to our moral capabilities.
Everyday moral stress in the form of uncertainty, moral residue, and low-stakes moral injury was a common feature of life before the coronavirus, and seems to be even more common as the pandemic wears on. This can lead to painful feelings as we grapple with guilt and sadness. It also risks leading to weakened moral agency as we try to cope with desensitization, burnout, demoralization, and alienation. I don’t know what the best response to everyday moral stress is—how we can work to heal our wounds and support others in their healing, or how to maintain our own moral capacities while collectively bolstering the capacities of each other. I suspect that it will take a lot of hard work, and that we won’t always succeed. But I think an important first step is openly recognizing and acknowledging the impact of everyday moral stress, so that we can better understand what we are experiencing and engage in more productive reflection about how to move forward.
Alida Liberman is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. Her research interests include practical ethics, normative ethics, and the space in between, as well as feminist philosophy. She is also interested in philosophical pedagogy and how to make philosophy classrooms more inclusive. You can find out more about her work at www.alidaliberman.com.
