My take on this is that all of the good that we can get from the freedom to determine our own lives and the course of our societies is defeated when that is turned to irresponsible, selfish, self-centered liberty to do whatever we want without responsibility. I know using the word "liberty" so popular with, especially, conservatives but also with secular liberals in that contrast is bound to be everything from confusing to enraging but that's what it is. Liberty removed from the morality of the Golden Rule which we cannot seem to extend to even our fellow humans, will always be a mortal danger to someone. In this case, since a virus is involved, to everyone.
In the last part of Walter Brueggemann's lecture Slow Wisdom As A Subversion (or Sub-Version) of Reality he said that what is a proper lesson of kindergarten is also part of the relevant business of the university. I think it can be condensed in the real, effective, responsible and consistent practice of moral responsibility and the fetish of liberty and individualism which is the underside of the credo of American civic faith is and always will be in opposition to that moral responsibility. In normal times it is far less dramatically obvious to most people what the consequences of that selfish irresponsibility is because its consequences are not made real in a viral disease that can kill you or seriously disable you, very likely in some cases permanently.
If, as I believe most likely, the disease originated in the brutally cruel wet market captivity and slaughter of wild animals so rich people could eat meat - AND LET'S NOT KID OURSELVES, IT COULD WELL HAVE ORIGINATED IN AN AMERICA, EUROPEAN OR THIRD-WORLD PIG MEAT OR CHICKEN OR DUCK OPERATION - its origin is from acts of callous human selfishness and feeding appetites.
If, and though I don't believe it the idea is not entirely implausible, the virus was a result of human manipulation in a scientific lab, it was, again, created in an act of dubious responsibility, certainly one of wisdom generating something that scientists who never consider morality as a part of their purely scientific work certainly should have thought many times over whether or not they should do it. I can't know if it was out of professional interest, the eternal quest among scientists to have something else to publish or, if it was to be concealed, to get them approval at work, or if it was merely the kind of scientific curiosity that I once heard an ex-Soviet scientist say led him to try to create the most deadly possible viruses he could construct with the tool of breeding he had at his dispose. The ability of scientists to manipulate DNA at a level they can now makes the choice to permit science to be done merely out of a quest for knowledge and not with a strong hand of considering moral responsibility is probably one of the more dangerous things in human culture today. I think it could turn out to be the thing that turns our ability to do science and the modernism that included the rise of modern science divorced from questions of morality into the definitive maladaptation as Darwinists conceive of them, leading to the extinction of our species as, in fact, science has given us the amorally used power to drive so many thousands of other species into extinction.
It's been my experience of talking to some of them that many scientists don't even want us to consider the possibility that it originated in the work of scientists, as if they are not as prone to unintentionally carry a deadly virus out of the lab as a worker in raising animals in the meat industry could. Even that level of moral awareness and reflection is anathema to them. In the West, they don't even want the inconvenience of considering that their laxly supervised, dopey kid grad assistants are quite capable of getting infected and then going out into the wider world. And I do think a lot of that is a matter of professional, faculty convenience.
If what Chris Hayes said didn't scare you enough, I'll leave you with that thought, that the science that may save us from this one, and that's entirely dependent on medical, epidemiological and other branches of science being made effective by a morality that is absent from science, itself and that could be swamped by either the amorality of our feeding our appetites without regard for the suffering of our fellow creatures. Or that scientists on the make are allowed to do some stupendously dangerous things that can escape the lab and spread like the Covid-19 virus has, even more dangerous things. Though I think in this case it was viruses passing among different species, picking up mutations and passing into the human beings selling the miserable creatures to people to eat them. The next one could, as ones in the past have, come from an American pig breeding operation or a chicken meat factory.
It all started in allowing huge areas of human activity to sluff off moral considerations instead of practicing them. As even the discussion of moral considerations became unfashionable and then distasteful in our pursuit of liberty that has successfully been transformed from a value intrinsically wedded to responsibility into an idol of self-indulgence, there's nothing else to stop our self-extinction.
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