giving relief goods essay covid 19

• SUBSCRIBE --> Subscribe

• Arts & Culture
• Civic Engagement
• Economic Development
• Environment
• Human Rights
• Social Services
• Water & Sanitation
• Foundations
• Nonprofits & NGOs
• Social Enterprise
• Collaboration
• Design Thinking
• Impact Investing
• Measurement & Evaluation
• Organizational Development

Philanthropy & Funding

• Current Issue
• Sponsored Supplements
• Global Editions
• In-Depth Series
• Stanford PACS
• Submission Guidelines

Household Generosity During the Pandemic

Social and behavioral sciences can help us understand why COVID-19 is making giving practices more localized and expansive.

• order reprints
• related stories

By Sevda Kilicalp Jan. 19, 2021

A few weeks ago, a close friend approached me to join in a giving circle supporting families facing financial hardship in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. I accepted the invitation without a second thought. And I was not the only one: In less than 24 hours, a circle of 25 donors from my friend’s personal networks was formed, with monthly giving orders placed to regularly meet the needs of a group of vulnerable families identified by volunteers. No questions were asked, nor concerns raised about how the money would be spent. The first family received assistance the following day.

If I had been solicited to donate directly to individual victims before the pandemic, I would not only have declined, but I would have tried to convince my friend to give to a charity working for the eradication of poverty, in a systematic manner, advocating for policy change or holding government to account for its responsibility to take care of those who are in need of social assistance. And as someone who has studied and promoted strategic giving and development of organized civil society for more than 15 years, I still strongly believe in the importance of supporting systems change work that attacks root causes of problems rather than treating symptoms of the problems through the acts of benevolence.

However, I am not the only person who has gone far outside of their usual donation path during the pandemic. The pandemic and related lock-down not only gave rise to charitable giving but triggered a different type of generosity compared to other disasters and difficult times in history.

Here are some highlights about how COVID-19 is shifting household giving:

Pressing Needs Lifted Up Causes Linked to the Crisis … While Leaving Others Behind

The amount donated to charities in the UK on Giving Tuesday was up by almost half this year despite the restrictions on in-person fundraising activities. But this doesn’t mean that households increased their giving to the same causes they used to support: Support grew for causes linked to the crisis, while causes like animal shelters, disability support groups, and homeless shelters saw a big hit to donations (even while facing extraordinary new financial pressures). Similarly, 21 percent of US households indicated that their giving to charitable organizations focused on purposes besides basic needs/health and religion (e.g., education, arts, the environment) decreased during the COVID-19 pandemic. US households prioritized giving to meet the pressing needs of those in their area.

While all nonprofits face new challenges, the financial impact of the crisis has been uneven: Environmental, education, arts and culture organizations are least likely to get gifts while charitable giving for social services remains steady. Since donations make up an important part of small to mid-size nonprofit revenues, nonprofits that see a serious drop in donations may have to shift focus and approach following the current changes in the nature of charitable giving. While some of them resort to layoffs, reduce operations, or merge with other organizations in order to survive, for others it will be almost impossible to recover, and they will be forced to shut their doors. This requires those that are not providing direct COVID-19 relief to communicate effectively with donors regarding the interconnectedness between their causes and the challenges we are all experiencing during the pandemic.

Mutual Aid Is Rising

So many mutual aid groups have been flourishing over the pandemic. Mutual aid, far from being a new concept, means voluntary and reciprocal exchanges of resources and services, often among members of struggling communities for meeting their own needs and addressing underlying social causes behind hardship based on principles of cooperation, solidarity, care, and direct action. Most recently, in the context of pandemic, we see more and more ordinary people come together in the spirit of solidarity and engage in mutual support to protect the most vulnerable in their community and beyond. Inspiring stories have been emerging about neighbors helping neighbors with hardship. Mutual aid groups took on various tasks such as collecting groceries, supplying masks, sanitizers, and medicine, sharing information, offering emotional support, tutoring children.

This highly localized approach to supporting communities seems to be working because smaller mutual aid groups are able to act quickly and provide locally specific support. Mutual aid is also distinguished from top-down resource distribution by its focus on reciprocity, horizontality, and equality. Mutual aid groups remove the divide between helper and helped and dismiss means test to assess whether the person effectively lacks sufficient resources. In this way, they not only reach out to people left behind by other relief programs but also go beyond crisis relief and offer community empowerment.

The question is whether mutual aid groups will be dissolved after the end of the crisis, if the sense of urgency disappears and people go back to their routine, or whether the rediscovery of mutual aid in the northern hemisphere signals the start of a long-term phenomenon. If mutual aid is here to stay, nonprofit practitioners will need to figure out whether mutual aid expands the civic space or crowds out the support for top-down, professionally-organized civil society by applying more participatory, inclusive, and hands-on methods and engaging ordinary people in community affairs.

Solidarity Is Coming Together With Social Justice Activism

Some commentators argue that these self-organized, spontaneous community efforts serve to compensate for states’ failure or unwillingness to provide welfare functions. While some of the mutual aid groups are less ideological and view their activities in terms of short-term crisis response, others see COVID-19 aid as an opportunity to work towards transformative change . Although I am cautious about the risk of instrumentalization of mutual aid by governments to pursue their own political agendas, I firmly believe in the potential of mutual aid for creating new commons and building bottom-up structures of cooperation. Even the very simple act of building social relations among neighbors from diverse backgrounds in our polarized societies can be considered a form of everyday activism .

This renewed sense of community and alternative social relationships based on solidarity, reciprocity, and inclusion can change prevailing ideas about how society works and sow the seeds of long term social and political change. In addition to prefiguring a radically different society, mutual aid shifts our understanding of inequalities in access to basic services and rights away from abstract societal issues toward local realities affecting real people living in our geographic proximity. This kind of awareness and personal connection with social justice causes is likely to increase people’s civic and political engagement.

More Expansive Forms of Generosity Are Emerging

Just as the pandemic is unlike anything we’ve seen in our lifetimes, the responses to it are different, more creative and resourceful. According to a recent report from Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy’s Women’s Philanthropy Institute, nearly half of households in the USA gave indirectly in response to the pandemic during the early months of the crisis (for example, by ordering takeout to support restaurants and their employees or continuing to pay individuals and businesses for services they could not render). The share of households participating in these unique forms of philanthropy far surpassed the share of those giving directly to charitable organizations, individuals, or businesses in response to the crisis during this time. This is an important finding to show that declines in measured household giving do not mean less generosity, care for one’s fellow citizens, or support for communities. We need to start recognizing and celebrating different kinds of informal giving and develop adequate measures.

Likewise, another study with young Americans (ages 18-30) in April 2020, found that these individuals engaged in a variety of activities to help others during the crisis, including starting to purchase or increasing their purchase of local products or services (26 percent), donating goods or services (24 percent), and posting or sharing content on social media about COVID-19 prevention (21 percent). Taking all these acts of kindness into consideration, our understanding of generosity behavior becomes much richer, inclusive, and complete than formal measures of household giving.

Insights From the Social and Behavioral Sciences

The conditions created by the pandemic influence how much people give, whom to give, what to give, and how to give. Of course, several factors, such as age, gender, economic stability, and exposure to COVID-19 have an influence on our pro-social behavior, so do neural, biological, and emotional mechanisms. Insights from the social and behavioral sciences can be useful for understanding why charitable giving is changing and becoming more localized and expansive.

1.  Social distancing urges us to reconnect with others to cope with psychological distress. While social distancing has been effective at flattening the curve of infection, it has had significant negative effects on mental health (leading to psychological distress like depression, anxiety, and stress) as found in recent research . Humans are by their nature social animals and have a fundamental need for connection with one another: As neuroscientist and social psychologist Matthew Lieberman explains, evolution made us more social, more connected to and dependent on the social world to ensure that humans thrive as a species; hence our brains suffer from threat to social bonds in much the same way we experience physical pain.

The neural link between social and physical pain urges us to reach out to and interact with others. Caring for others, especially informal helping , increases the sense of social connectedness and becomes the best way to combat social pain and loneliness. By engaging in acts of kindness we are not contributing to the common good but responding to our survival need.

2.  Reawakening to our collective vulnerability creates a sense of collaboration. Not everyone reacts to stress in the same way, whether fight-or-flight or tend-and-befriend mode. But the tend-and-befriend response to COVID-19 involves caring for ourselves and those close to us, as well as building collective self-help networks to reduce vulnerability and exchange resources and responsibilities. Alex Evans of Collective Psychology Project suggests that the pandemic incites our “tend-and-befriend” nature to the extent that we consider ourselves part of a larger us, feel like we can shape our lives and have mental space to deliberatively reflect on and choose how to react to events instead of being driven by fear and anxiety.

3.  The problem of numbers . Some argue that the surge of generosity during the COVID-19 pandemic is due to the sheer magnitude of the crisis , but the brain’s inability to make sense of big numbers makes it difficult to process tragedy of this scale, and concern for those in distress does not tend to rise in parallel to the increase in cases. On the contrary, the more our attention is divided by multiple victims, the less emotion we feel and action we take to support them. Individual stories of pain and small groups of victims trigger more empathy and compassion than statistics.

In addition to numeracy bias, a false feeling of inefficacy has an enormous impact on how and whether people provide aid. Thinking about one’s inability to remedy all sufferings triggers feelings of hopelessness and diminishes the warm glow from helping an individual victim. As a result, individuals tend to give toward identifiable victims rather than statistical victims. This may be one reason why households prefer helping people in their surrounding environment.

4.  Feeling collective . The notion that “we’re all in this together” and the virus threatens everyone (although not equally) creates a collective emotional experience. Research shows sharing adverse experiences may increase cooperative behavior within groups, leading individuals to mutually seek and provide support to one another. While these negative experiences enhance ingroup cooperation, they also fuel polarization , and intergroup bias toward outgroup members, thus contribute to conflict, discrimination, and exclusion.

We Need Critical Reflection About the Localization of Charitable Giving

COVID-19 has driven a surge in “localism” around the world, bringing increased attention to pressing needs within our communities and the responsibility to take care of one another as well as fears about the end of globalization . As The Economist wrote, “Wave goodbye to the greatest era of globalization—and worry about what is going to take its place.” Similar concerns have been echoed in the philanthropic community.

However, we don’t need to feel threatened by the localization of philanthropy or the rise of new forms of giving; we simply need to recognize various ways in which individuals express their charitable impulses. These are important developments for nonprofits to watch and understand not only to remain relevant and resonate with citizens but also to build on these recent practices to empower communities. Much attention has been placed on responses of institutional philanthropy and how philanthropic foundations do/can support the resilience of nonprofits. How charitable giving by households—as we know it—has been changing amid the COVID-19 pandemic has been overshadowed by these discussions.

In the face of growing critiques of big-money philanthropy, there have been calls to extend our definition and understanding of philanthropy beyond formalized actions and recognize the value of everyday giving by ordinary people. Making philanthropy more democratic, accessible, and inclusive is necessary not to tackle philanthropy’s “image problem,” rather to bring back the classic notion of civil society response to local problem solving, which will be more needed than ever for regenerating trust and collective sense of caring in the post-COVID era.

Support  SSIR ’s coverage of cross-sector solutions to global challenges.  Help us further the reach of innovative ideas.  Donate today .

Read more stories by Sevda Kilicalp .

SSIR.org and/or its third-party tools use cookies, which are necessary to its functioning and to our better understanding of user needs. By closing this banner, scrolling this page, clicking a link or continuing to otherwise browse this site, you agree to the use of cookies.

• Skip to the Content
• Skip to the Footer

Julian Samora Research Institute

Impact of the coronavirus stimulus checks on the economy.

By: Marcelo Siles

The emergence of the COVID-19 virus early in 2020 had a huge impact on this country’s economy, with federal and state agencies, as well as many private companies from different sectors, forced to stop their operations in order to preserve the health of their workforce and to prevent the spread of the virus.  As a result, the unemployment rate suffered a substantial increase, reaching 14.7% in April 2020, the highest rate observed since data collection began in 1948. The high unemployment rate disproportionately impacted the nation’s communities of color (e.g., Latinos, African Americans) and low-wage workers. Many households, mainly those with children, were unable to pay for their basic needs: food, housing, utilities, and transportation.

In response, the U.S. Government designed and delivered three stimulus packages from April 2020 to July 2021 aimed at ameliorating the economic and financial hardships caused by the pandemic on low- and medium-income households. Two months after the first case of COVID-19 case was made public, on March 25, 2020, U.S. Senators, both Republicans and Democrats, agreed on a relief package called the CARES Act, a $2.2 trillion stimulus package. This incentives package included relief funds for hospitals, businesses, and workers. The CARES Act included stimulus financial aid for qualified tax-paying adults in the amount of $1,200, while their dependents, a maximum of three under 16 years of age who qualified for this program, received $500 each. Disbursements were made to individuals with an Adjusted Gross Income of $75,000 or less and $150,000 for married couples. The first stimulus checks reached the recipients’ bank accounts on April 11 and 12 and by paper checks sent by mail or through a prepaid debit card, the Economic Impact Payment (EIP) Card.

The second stimulus package, The Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2021, was signed by former President Donald J. Trump on December 27, 2020.  It was a $900 billion package that included disbursements of up to $600 per household plus an additional $600 for dependent children ages 16 or under.  As in the previous stimulus package, those individuals who earned up to $75,000 in 2019 received the full stimulus check, while a gradually smaller figure was provided to those with higher annual incomes, up to a maximum of $87,000.

On March 11, 2021, President Biden signed into Law a third stimulus package The American Rescue Plan, with a total budget of $1.9 trillion. This package included payments to households that did not receive any payments on the first two rounds. This stimulus package provided check payments of up to $1,400 to eligible individual taxpayers and a maximum of $2,800 to couples who filed their taxes together. In addition, families with dependents, regardless of their age, were eligible for an extra payment of $1,400 per dependent, with no limit to the number of dependents that they could claim.

The first payments were issued quickly. The initial batch of 164 million payments with a total value of $386 billion was sent as direct deposits to individuals’ bank accounts on March 13 and 14, 2021. More batches of stimulus payments were made to individuals and households just after the initial disbursements of the third stimulus package.

How Americans Spent Their Stimulus Checks An article published in Forbes by Zack Friedman provides estimates on how Americans spent their stimulus checks. The spending priorities differed among the three stimulus packages and depended on the prevailing economic and financial conditions at the time the first checks were issued from each stimulus package.  According to Friedman’s article, U.S. households assigned their stimulus money to three main categories: spend, save, or pay debt. Table 1 provides the spending priorities of households for each of the stimulus packages.

Table 1. U.S. Households’ Spending Priorities with Coronavirus Stimulus Money

Source: Forbes , Zack Friedman, 2021.

The first stimulus package, enacted at the beginning of the pandemic when the national economy was facing an unemployment rate of 14.7%, mainly supported households in meeting basic household needs, namely food purchases, rent and utilities, and other basic needs. Up to 74% of households spent their first stimulus checks on meeting their families’ basic needs.  However, up to 14% of these funds were allocated to savings and 11% were used to pay debt.

The second stimulus package was enacted at the end of December 2020, at that time the economy experienced a degree of recovery, and the unemployment rate fell to 6.7%. The improved economic conditions induced households to change their spending habits with monies received from the second stimulus package. Only 22% of these funds were spent on food and other basic needs. Instead, monies allocated to savings rose to 26% and up to 51% were used to pay debt, 4.6 times more than were funds from the first package.

Use of funds from the third stimulus package by households was like the pattern found with the second package. Fewer funds obtained from the third stimulus package were used to meet basic needs, with only 19% of these funds used for this purpose, while 32% were allocated to savings. Finally, 49% of the stimulus money was used to pay debt. This package also included a monthly Advance Child Tax Credit (CTC). Households with children that were facing food insufficiency, not enough food to eat, were the main beneficiaries of this stimulus program (Perez-Lopez, 2021). It is interesting to note the high percentage of funds allocated to savings and to pay debt with money received from the second and third stimulus packages, 78% and 81%, respectively. Whether or not this pattern was the same across the different ethno-racial groups would be good to know, and perhaps data will soon be available to shed light on this question.

Friedman Zack, “Here’s How Americans Spent Their Stimulus Checks,” Forbes, June 1, 2021. https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackfriedman/2021/06/01/heres-how-americans-spent-their-stimulus-checks/?sh=20049e2e5e0a

Perez-Lopez Daniel, “Household Pulse Survey Collected Responses Just Before and Just After the Arrival of the First CTC Checks,” August 11, 2021. https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/08/economic-hardship-declined-in-households-with-children-as-child-tax-credit-payments-arrived.html

What Mutual Aid Can Do During a Pandemic

We are not accustomed to destruction looking, at first, like emptiness. The coronavirus pandemic is disorienting in part because it defies our normal cause-and-effect shortcuts to understanding the world. The source of danger is invisible; the most effective solution involves willing paralysis; we won’t know the consequences of today’s actions until two weeks have passed. Everything circles a bewildering paradox: other people are both a threat and a lifeline. Physical connection could kill us, but civic connection is the only way to survive.

In March, even before widespread workplace closures and self-isolation, people throughout the country began establishing informal networks to meet the new needs of those around them. In Aurora, Colorado, a group of librarians started assembling kits of essentials for the elderly and for children who wouldn’t be getting their usual meals at school. Disabled people in the Bay Area organized assistance for one another ; a large collective in Seattle set out explicitly to help “Undocumented, LGBTQI, Black, Indigenous, People of Color, Elderly, and Disabled, folxs who are bearing the brunt of this social crisis.” Undergrads helped other undergrads who had been barred from dorms and cut off from meal plans. Prison abolitionists raised money so that incarcerated people could purchase commissary soap. And, in New York City, dozens of groups across all five boroughs signed up volunteers to provide child care and pet care, deliver medicine and groceries, and raise money for food and rent. Relief funds were organized for movie-theatre employees , sex workers , and street venders . Shortly before the city’s restaurants closed, on March 16th, leaving nearly a quarter of a million people out of work, three restaurant employees started the Service Workers Coalition , quickly raising more than twenty-five thousand dollars to distribute as weekly stipends. Similar groups, some of which were organized by restaurant owners, are now active nationwide.

As the press reported on this immediate outpouring of self-organized voluntarism, the term applied to these efforts, again and again, was “mutual aid,” which has entered the lexicon of the coronavirus era alongside “social distancing” and “flatten the curve.” It’s not a new term, or a new idea, but it has generally existed outside the mainstream. Informal child-care collectives, transgender support groups, and other ad-hoc organizations operate without the top-down leadership or philanthropic funding that most charities depend on. There is no comprehensive directory of such groups, most of which do not seek or receive much attention. But, suddenly, they seemed to be everywhere.

On March 17th, I signed up for a new mutual-aid network in my neighborhood, in Brooklyn, and used a platform called Leveler to make micropayments to out-of-work freelancers. Then I trekked to the thirty-five-thousand-square-foot Fairway in Harlem to meet Liam Elkind, a founder of Invisible Hands, which was providing free grocery delivery to the elderly, the ill, and the immunocompromised in New York. Elkind, a junior at Yale, had been at his family’s place, in Morningside Heights, for spring break when the crisis began. Working with his friends Simone Policano, an artist, and Healy Chait, a business major at N.Y.U., he built the group’s sleek Web site in a day. During the next ninety-six hours, twelve hundred people volunteered; some of them helped to translate the organization’s flyer into more than a dozen languages and distributed copies of it to buildings around the city. By the time I met him, Elkind and his co-founders had spoken to people hoping to create Invisible Hands chapters in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, and Chicago. The group was featured on “Fox & Friends,” in a segment about young people stepping up in the pandemic; the co-host Brian Kilmeade encouraged viewers to send in more “inspirational stories and photos of people doing great things.”

At the Fairway, Elkind, who has dark hair and a chipper student-body-president demeanor, put on a pair of latex gloves and grabbed a shopping basket, which he sanitized with a wipe. He was getting groceries for an immunocompromised woman in Harlem. “Scallions are the onion things, right?” he said, as we wound through the still robust produce section. At the time, those who signed up to volunteer for Invisible Hands joined a group text; when requests for help came in, texts went out, and volunteers claimed them on a first-come-first-served basis. They called the recipients to ask what they needed, then dropped the grocery bags at their doorsteps; the recipients left money under their mats or in mailboxes. The group was planning to raise funds to buy groceries for those who couldn’t afford them, Elkind told me. While we stood in the dairy section trying to decide between low-fat Greek yogurt and nonfat regular—the store was out of nonfat Greek—a reporter from “Inside Edition” materialized and began snapping photographs. Elkind apologized; he hadn’t meant to double-book media engagements. “Not to be trite, but I feel like this is spreading faster than the virus,” he said.

Link copied

The next day, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez held a public conference call with the organizer Mariame Kaba about how to build a mutual-aid network. Kaba is the founder of Project Nia, a prison-abolitionist organization that successfully campaigned for the right of Illinois minors to have their arrest records expunged when they turn eighteen. “There are two ways that this can go for us,” Ocasio-Cortez said on the call. “We can buy into the old frameworks of, when a disaster hits, it’s every person for themselves. Or we can affirmatively choose a different path. And we can build a different world, even if it’s just on our building floor, even if it’s just in our neighborhood, even if it’s just on our block.” She pointed out that those in a position to help didn’t have to wait “for Congress to pass a bill, or the President to do something.” The following week, the Times ran a column headlined “Feeling Powerless About Coronavirus? Join a Mutual-Aid Network.” Vox, Teen Vogue, and other outlets also ran explainers and how-tos.

Mutual-aid work thrives on sustained personal relationships, but the coronavirus has necessitated that relationships be built online. After meeting Elkind, I joined a Zoom call with thirteen students at the University of Minnesota Medical School who had been pulled from their classes or clinical rotations. Their mentors and teachers were putting in fifteen-hour hospital shifts, then waiting in long lines to buy diapers before going home to their kids. The students had rapidly assembled a group called the Minnesota COVID Sitters, which matched nearly three hundred volunteers with a hundred and fifty or so hospital workers—including custodians, cooks, and other essential employees. The students insured that volunteers had immunizations and background checks; they established closed rotations of three to five volunteers for each family in need. On the Zoom call, everyone was focussed and eager, crisis adrenaline masking their fatigue. One student held a mellow, pink-cheeked infant on his shoulder.

Just a few days before, on Twitter, I had seen a photograph of a handwritten flyer that a thirty-three-year-old woman named Maggie Connolly had posted in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Carroll Gardens, asking elderly neighbors to get in touch if they needed groceries or other help. Connolly, a hair-and-makeup artist, was newly out of work, and figured that many older people might not see aid efforts that were being organized online. The picture of the sign got attention on the Internet, and Connolly ended up on the “Today” show; soon afterward, she began arranging pharmacy runs and wellness checks for her neighbors and getting e-mails from people around the world who’d been inspired to put up flyers of their own. “My mom’s always told me that if I feel anxious and depressed I should think of how I can be of service to somebody,” she told me. “Hopefully, when we control the virus a little bit more and get back to regular life, this will have been a wake-up call. I think people aren’t used to being able to ask for help, and people aren’t used to offering.”

There’s a certain kind of news story that is presented as heartwarming but actually evinces the ravages of American inequality under capitalism: the account of an eighth grader who raised money to eliminate his classmates’ lunch debt, or the report on a FedEx employee who walked twelve miles to and from work each day until her co-workers took up a collection to buy her a car. We can be so moved by the way people come together to overcome hardship that we lose sight of the fact that many of these hardships should not exist at all. In a recent article for the journal Social Text , the lawyer and activist Dean Spade cites news reports about volunteer boat rescues during Hurricane Harvey which did not mention the mismanagement of government relief efforts, or identify the possible climatological causes of worsening hurricanes, or point out who suffers most in the wake of brutal storms. Conservative politicians can point to such stories, which ignore the social forces that determine the shape of our disasters, and insist that voluntarism is preferable to government programs.

A decade ago, the writer Rebecca Solnit published the book “ A Paradise Built in Hell ,” which argues that during collective disasters the “suspension of the usual order and the failure of most systems” spur widespread acts of altruism—and these improvisations, Solnit suggests, can lead to lasting civic change. Among the examples Solnit cites are tenant groups that formed in Mexico City after a devastating earthquake, in 1985, and later played a role in the city’s transition to a democratic government. Radicalizing moments accumulate; organizing and activism beget more organizing and activism. As I called individuals around the country who were setting up coronavirus-relief efforts, I kept encountering people who had participated in anti-globalization protests in the early two-thousands, or joined the Occupy movement, or organized grassroots campaigns in the aftermath of the 2016 Presidential election. In 2017, as wildfires ravaged Northern California, a collective of primarily disabled queer and trans people, who called themselves Mask Oakland, began giving out N95 masks to the homeless; in March and April, they donated thousands of masks that they had in reserve to local emergency rooms and clinics.

Radicalism has been at the heart of mutual aid since it was introduced as a political idea. In 1902, the Russian naturalist and anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin—who was born a prince in 1842, got sent to prison in his early thirties for belonging to a banned intellectual society, and spent the next forty years as a writer in Europe—published the book “ Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution .” Kropotkin identifies solidarity as an essential practice in the lives of swallows and marmots and primitive hunter-gatherers; coöperation, he argues, was what allowed people in medieval villages and nineteenth-century farming syndicates to survive. That inborn solidarity has been undermined, in his view, by the principle of private property and the work of state institutions. Even so, he maintains, mutual aid is “the necessary foundation of everyday life” in downtrodden communities, and “the best guarantee of a still loftier evolution of our race.”

Charitable organizations are typically governed hierarchically, with decisions informed by donors and board members. Mutual-aid projects tend to be shaped by volunteers and the recipients of services. Both mutual aid and charity address the effects of inequality, but mutual aid is aimed at root causes —at the structures that created inequality in the first place. A few days after her conference call with Ocasio-Cortez, Mariame Kaba told me that mutual aid couldn’t be divorced from political education and activism. “It’s not community service—you’re not doing service for service’s sake,” she said. “You’re trying to address real material needs.” If you fail to meet those needs, she added, you also fail to “build the relationships that are needed to push back on the state.”

Kaba, a longtime Chicago activist who now lives in New York and runs the blog Prison Culture, describes herself as an abolitionist, not as an anarchist. She wants to create a world without prisons and policing, and that requires imagining other structures of accountability—and also of assistance. “I want us to act as if the state is not a protector, and to be keenly aware of the damage it can do,” she told me. People who are deeply committed to mutual aid think of it as a crucial, everyday practice, she said, not as a “program to pull off the shelf when shit gets bad.”

Historically, in the United States, mutual-aid networks have proliferated mostly in communities that the state has chosen not to help. The peak of such organizing may have come in the late sixties and early seventies, when Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries opened a shelter for homeless trans youth, in New York, and the Black Panther Party started a free-breakfast program, which within its first year was feeding twenty thousand children in nineteen cities across the country. J. Edgar Hoover worried that the program would threaten “efforts by authorities to neutralize the BPP and destroy what it stands for”; a few years later, the federal government formalized its own breakfast program for public schools.

Crises can intensify the antagonism between the government and mutual-aid workers. Dozens of cities restrict community efforts to feed the homeless; in 2019, activists with No More Deaths, a group that leaves water and supplies in border-crossing corridors, were tried on federal charges, including driving in a wilderness area and “abandoning property.” But disasters can also force otherwise opposing sides to work together. During Hurricane Sandy, the National Guard, in the face of government failure, relied on the help of an Occupy Wall Street offshoot, Occupy Sandy, to distribute supplies.

“Anarchists are not absolutist,” Spade, the lawyer and activist, told me. “We can believe in a diversity of tactics. I spend my life fighting for people to get welfare benefits, for trans people to get health-care coverage.” Kaba isn’t doctrinaire, either; she had, after all, partnered with Ocasio-Cortez, a member of the federal government, to help people learn how to help one another. (Ocasio-Cortez, for her part, insisted, on Twitter, that organizers and activists, not politicians, are often the ones who “push society forward.”) Still, there is a real tension between statist and anarchist theories of political change, Kaba pointed out. In trying to help a community meet its needs, one group of organizers might suggest canvassing for political candidates who support Medicare for All. Another might argue that electoral politics, with its top-down structures and its uncertain results, is the wrong place to direct most of one’s energy—that we should focus instead on building community co-ops that can secure health care and opportunities for work. But sorting out the conflict between these visions is part of the larger project, Kaba suggested, and a task for multiple generations. The day-to-day practice of mutual aid is simpler. It is a matter, she said, of “prefiguring the world in which you want to live.”

By April, as the death toll rose in New York City, many people I knew in Brooklyn had begun working with a mutual-aid group called Bed-Stuy Strong , which serves the neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant. Once predominantly black, the neighborhood has, in the past few decades, seen an influx of white residents. Bed-Stuy Strong was started by the writer Sarah Thankam Mathews, whose family moved to the United States from Oman when she was seventeen. Mathews organized the group on Slack, and it initially consisted of the Slack demographic: relatively privileged youngish people familiar with the digital workflows of white-collar offices. But volunteers plastered the neighborhood with flyers, and word of the group started to spread through phone calls and text messages. Hundreds of people began joining every day.

James Lipscomb, a former computer programmer in his sixties, who moved to Bed-Stuy from South Carolina when he was a teen-ager, learned about the group on Facebook—an acquaintance had called the organization’s Google Voice number, then written a post wondering if the whole thing was a scam. Lipscomb, who survived polio at age four, after spending months in an iron lung, has limited mobility, and lives alone. He had friends who were already sick with the coronavirus, and he knew that he should stay inside. Not long after he saw the Facebook post, a friend phoned him and said, “James, call this number. They’ll get your food.” He left Bed-Stuy Strong a voice mail, and someone called him back a few hours later. The next day, a volunteer arrived in his lobby with three bags of groceries. “I looked at everything and was like a kid at Christmas,” he told me. (He described himself as a “halfway decent cook,” with special skills in the chili arena.) Lipscomb is a longtime member of the Bed-Stuy chapter of Lions Club International, the first black chapter in New York State. He told the club members about his experience, and the club donated two hundred dollars to Bed-Stuy Strong. He also went back to the person who had written the skeptical Facebook post, he told me. “And I said, ‘Look, this group is the best-kept secret going now!’ ”

When I first spoke with Mathews, she quickly pointed out that other local groups—such as Equality for Flatbush, which organizes against unjust policing and housing displacement—had been “doing the work for much longer.” She told me that she didn’t want to raise her hand and say, “Look, we’re new, we’re so shiny, we’re on Slack!” The organization’s strictly local focus reflects a principle of many mutual-aid groups: that neighbors are best situated to help neighbors. Ocasio-Cortez’s team, after the conference call, distributed a guide hashtagged #WeGotOurBlock, with instructions for building a neighborhood “pod” by starting with groups of five to twenty people, drawing on ideas popularized by the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective. The idea of “pod-mapping,” according to one of the group’s founders, Mia Mingus, is to build lasting networks of support, rather than indulge in “fantasies of a giant, magical community response, filled with people we only had surface relationships with.”

Mingus, a disability activist who was born in Korea and brought up by a white couple in the U.S. Virgin Islands, told me that she’d been spending her days checking in on her pod, dropping off food and supplies for people, and her nights reading articles about layoffs and hospitalizations and new mutual-aid groups. She felt, she said, like the earth was moving beneath her feet. More people were recognizing that the problems Americans were facing weren’t caused just by the virus but by a health-care system that ties insurance to employment and a minimum wage so low that essential workers can’t save for the emergencies through which they will be asked to sustain the rest of the country. She’d learned, after years of organizing, that, in some ways, people are attracted to crisis—to letting problems escalate until they’re forced to spring into action. “Pods give us the structure to deal with smaller harms,” she said. “And we have to deal with smaller harms, or this is where we end up.”

Mathews told me that Bed-Stuy Strong was trying to plan for coming hardships that the government would also probably fail to adequately address. Unemployment would skyrocket in the neighborhood, and community needs would evolve. She is committed to the chaos of collective decision-making; the group’s discussions about operations and priorities happen publicly, with input from anyone who wants to contribute. There are no eligibility criteria for grocery recipients, other than Bed-Stuy residency. (A distinctive quality of mutual aid, in general contrast with charity and state services, is the absence of conditions for those who wish to receive help.)

Jackson Fratesi, a friend of mine in the neighborhood who used to oversee last-mile delivery operations for Walmart stores in New York and now helps run logistics for Bed-Stuy Strong, said, “We have guesses about what community needs will be in the future, but we also know that some of these needs will blindside us, and we’re trying to prepare for that.” He added, “And—who knows?—maybe one of the things we’ll be blindsided by is the government actually doing a good job.”

In her book “ Good Neighbors: The Democracy of Everyday Life in America ,” the Harvard political scientist Nancy L. Rosenblum considers the American fondness for acts of neighborly aid and coöperation, both in ordinary times, as with the pioneer practice of barn raising, and in periods of crisis. In Rosenblum’s view, “there is little evidence that disaster generates an appetite for permanent, energetic civic engagement.” On the contrary, “when government and politics disappear from view as they do, we are left with the not-so-innocuous fantasy of ungoverned reciprocity as the best and fully adequate society.” She cites the daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, Rose Wilder Lane, who helped her mother craft classic narratives of neighborly kindness and became a libertarian who opposed the New Deal and viewed Social Security as a Ponzi scheme.

I called Rosenblum to ask what she made of the current wave of ungoverned reciprocity. Disasters like this one, she said, have less to teach us about solidarity among neighbors than about our “need for a kind of nationwide solidarity—in other words, a social safety net.” She went on, “If you look at these really big, all-enveloping things—climate change, a pandemic—and think they will be solved by citizen mobilization, it may be necessary to consider the possibility that these problems are actually going to be solved technocratically and politically, from the top down, that what you need are experts in government who are going to say, ‘You just have to do this.’ My own opinion is that you need both top-down and bottom-up.” She continued, “But, still, the idea that what we need most, or only, is social solidarity, civic mobilization, neighborly virtue—it’s not so.”

Rosenblum, though, told me that she had noticed a difference between the mutual-aid groups that were forming in the wake of the coronavirus and the sorts of disaster-relief work that she had studied in the past. Because it had been clear from the beginning that the pandemic would last indefinitely, many groups had immediately begun thinking about long-term self-management, building volunteer infrastructures in order to get ahead of the worst of the crisis, and thinking about what could work for months rather than for days. “That’s interesting,” she said. “And I think it’s new.”

On Day Twelve of my self-isolation, I checked in with the Minnesota COVID Sitters. The governor there, Tim Walz, a Democrat, had mandated that health-care workers have access to free child care at school facilities, and I wanted to see how the government’s efforts were changing the group’s work. The COVID Sitters, like Bed-Stuy Strong, had been careful to coördinate with more established organizations, hoping to reduce redundancy and share resources. The group had funnelled donations—many from health-care workers who wanted to pay their volunteer babysitters—toward homeless shelters and food banks.

There were some things that the group could do more easily than the state. Families “need a child-care center that operates in traditional M-F fashion, like school would,” Londyn Robinson, one of the group’s organizers, told me in an e-mail, “and they also need a COVID Sitter-like option to fill in the cracks.” I had heard as much from Emily Fitzgerald, a nurse-midwife in Minnesota who, when the coronavirus first hit the region, had been frantically running child-care calculations, anticipating her team’s change from twelve-hour shifts to twenty-four-hour shifts. When she learned about COVID Sitters, she told me, she became emotional. “You’re just not expecting to be taken care of in that way,” she said. The Sitters were seeking at least three hundred and fifty new volunteers to support nearly a hundred unmatched families. At the end of March, the group became a nonprofit corporation, so that it could apply for state grants. The Sitters had also shared their blueprint with more than a hundred and thirty other med schools, thirty of which had set up operational sister groups.

Invisible Hands had also registered as a nonprofit, Liam Elkind told me when we spoke again, in mid-April. Lawyers helped the group establish bylaws, official titles, and oversight practices. The group had signed up twelve thousand volunteers and taken about four thousand requests. It had also raised fifty-seven thousand dollars for a subsidy program—whereby needy households could receive free weekly food baskets with staples such as milk, bread, and eggs—but it had suspended the program after demand increased, making it unsustainable. Money in reserve is going to administrative costs, such as software, insurance, and legal fees. Elkind was still in Morningside Heights, finishing the semester online. (“I have not prepared very well for my presentation tomorrow on comm law,” he told me.) Maggie Connolly, who put up the handwritten sign in Carroll Gardens, had started working with Invisible Hands, making grocery deliveries in her neighborhood. “I still love what I do as a hair-and-makeup artist, and I can’t wait to get back to work,” she said. “But this has really made me realize that I would like to shift more time into doing work that serves others.” She had raised money from people she knew who were also out of work—photographers, stylists, models—to buy food boxes for New York hospital staff.

On Day Twenty-two of self-isolation, I called Fratesi and Mathews, from Bed-Stuy Strong, on Zoom. The group, they said, had signed up twenty-five hundred volunteers, a third of whom were active in the group’s Slack channel on a daily or near-daily basis, and a fifth of whom had signed up to shop and make deliveries. Mathews hoped to sustain the network with the small donations it was getting, most of which seemed to be coming from Bed-Stuy residents and people who knew them. The group’s tech and operations teams had revamped the online system so that the most urgent requests—from people who’d been waiting the longest or who had explicitly said that their cupboards were bare—were continually resurfaced for delivery volunteers. “Oh, Sarah, what do you think—should we have a second Google Voice number where we just give people a phone tree of other resources?” Fratesi asked at one point, thinking through logistics as I interviewed them. New York City had announced a daily free-meal program, and other nonprofits were turning to coronavirus relief. We talked about whether mutual-aid work represented what the state ought to be doing, or what the state could never do properly, or maybe both. Three minutes after we finished our Zoom call, Bernie Sanders announced that he was suspending his Presidential campaign. “Our best-case scenario is that Biden wins????” Fratesi texted me. “ DIRECT ACTION IT IS THEN, I GUESS .” By the beginning of May, Bed-Stuy Strong had provided at least a week’s worth of groceries to more than thirty-five hundred people in the neighborhood. The group had raised a hundred and forty thousand dollars and spent a hundred and twenty-seven thousand dollars on food and supplies, such as medicine. What was left would keep the group operating for another week.

All the organizers I spoke to expressed a version of the hope that, after we emerge from isolation, much more will seem possible, that we will expect more of ourselves and of one another, that we will be permanently struck by the way our actions depend on and affect people we may never see or know. But the differences among the many volunteer groups that had suddenly sprouted were already sharpening. Some crisis volunteers find their work encouragingly apolitical: neighbors helping neighbors. Some are growing even more committed to socialist or anarchist ideals. “Community itself is not a panacea for oppression,” Kaba told me. “And if you think that this work is like programming a microwave, where an input leads to immediate output, that’s capitalism speaking.” It will be a loss, Spade told me, if mutual aid becomes vacated of political meaning at the moment that it begins to enter the mainstream—if we lose sight of the fundamental premise that, within its framework, we meet one another’s needs not just to fix things in the moment but to identify and push back on the structures that make those needs so dire. “What happens when people get together to support one another is that people realize that there’s more of us than there is of them,” he said. “This moment is a powder keg.”

The difficulty of sustaining this more radical vision was also becoming clear. Bed-Stuy Strong has one week of runway at a time. When I asked Rebecca Solnit about the evidence that disasters have prompted lasting civic changes, she pointed me to a number of specific organizations, and described their histories, but she also emphasized something less tangible, something she “heard over and over again from people,” she said. “They discovered a sense of self and a sense of connection to the people and place around them that did not go away, and, though they went back to their jobs in a market economy and their homes, that changed perspective stayed with them and maybe manifested in subtler ways than a project.” She added, “If we think of mutual aid as both a series of networks of resource and labor distribution and as an orientation, the former may become less necessary as ‘normal’ returns, but the latter may last.”

The coronavirus has already ushered in changes that would have been called impossible in January: evictions have been suspended, undocumented farmworkers have been classified as essential, the Centers for Disease Control has proclaimed that coronavirus testing and treatment will be covered by insurance. There are those who will want to return to normal after this crisis, and there are those who will decide that what was regarded as normal before was itself the crisis. Among the activists I talked to in the past several weeks was a thirty-year-old named Jeff Sorensen, who was working with the Washtenaw County Mutual Aid group , which was first created to help students affected by the closure of the University of Michigan. Some activists in the group had been involved with an existing mutual-aid network, in Ypsilanti, that was founded last year with long-term goals and radical principles in mind. Sorensen said that he was determined to be hopeful. “These things that are treated as ridiculous ideas,” he told me, “we’ll be able to say, ‘It’s not a ridiculous idea—it’s what we did during that time.’ ” ♦

An earlier version of this story misrepresented the C.D.C.’s policy on expenses related to coronavirus testing and treatment.

A Guide to the Coronavirus

• Twenty-four hours at the epicenter of the pandemic : nearly fifty *New Yorker* writers and photographers fanned out to document life in New York City on April 15th.
• Seattle leaders let scientists take the lead in responding to the coronavirus. New York leaders did not .
• Can survivors help cure the disease and rescue the economy ?
• What the coronavirus has revealed about American medicine .
• Can we trace the spread of *COVID*{: .small}-19 and protect privacy at the same time?
• The coronavirus is likely to spread for more than a year before a vaccine is widely available.
• How to practice social distancing , from responding to a sick housemate to the pros and cons of ordering food .
• The long crusade of Dr. Anthony Fauci , the infectious-disease expert pinned between Donald Trump and the American people.
• What to read, watch, cook, and listen to under quarantine .

An official website of the United States government

Official websites use .gov A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS A lock ( Lock Locked padlock icon ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

• Publications
• Account settings
• Advanced Search
• Journal List

Reciprocity and the ethics of giving during pandemics

Pierce randall, justin bernstein.

• Author information
• Article notes
• Copyright and License information

Correspondence , Pierce Randall, Alden March Bioethics Institute, Albany Medical Center, Albany, NY, USA, Email: [email protected]

Corresponding author.

Revised 2020 Oct 24; Received 2020 Jun 25; Accepted 2020 Nov 30; Issue date 2021 Winter.

This article is being made freely available through PubMed Central as part of the COVID-19 public health emergency response. It can be used for unrestricted research re-use and analysis in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source, for the duration of the public health emergency.

1. INTRODUCTION

The COVID‐19 pandemic has had devastating effects worldwide. In response, many individuals have made significant sacrifices. These sacrifices include those made by essential workers who risk infection to ensure that others can have access to adequate food, medical care, electricity, and other goods distancing. Individuals are also asked to sacrifice through social distancing, which brings about a collective benefit in the form of a reduced overall transmission rate of coronavirus (Cato, et al., 2020 ). Yet it is also quite burdensome. Many workers have foregone earning incomes, businesses have ceased operating, and children have missed educational opportunities, to name just a few prominent costs. In response to these sacrifices, a natural question concerns what individuals can do to help. We argue that those who have not been significantly burdened by the collective response to the pandemic have an obligation to give to help support those who have—especially those who have been burdened due to background injustices. We focus particularly on the American context, although similar points likely apply to other countries as well.

In Section 2 , we consider two different rationales for donating to people who have borne especially significant hardships during the pandemic. While one approach would be to focus on duties of aid as a rationale for giving, we argue that a reciprocity‐based approach is more sensitive to the ways in which people undertake burdens in order to produce a collective good. In Section 3 , we defend the claim that compensation is owed to those who have been unfairly burdened in order to produce a collective benefit. In the fourth section, we address the issue of who counts as having been unfairly burdened by the pandemic. We argue that those who are especially burdened due to pre‐pandemic injustices have an especially strong claim to compensation. In Section 5 , we argue that giving money to those who have borne unfair burdens in response to the COVID‐19 pandemic can be understood as a way of addressing a predictable epistemic limitation on the part of the state. In the final section, we address three objections to our position.

2. TWO APPROACHES TO GIVING DURING A DISASTER

The ethics of giving during a pandemic like COVID‐19 might initially appear similar to the ethics of giving in response to natural disasters or diseases more generally. For example, one might think that, just as one ought to donate money to relief efforts after a hurricane, one should also donate money to those who have been especially harmed by the pandemic. Duties of aid might appear to be especially significant in the face of the current pandemic. And there is a sense in which this is correct: duties of aid do count in favor of giving money to those who are in need as a direct result of the pandemic.

Yet to merely view COVID‐19 as a disaster that triggers duties of aid would be incomplete. A morally salient difference between pandemics and hurricanes is that many of the costs of the pandemics arise, at least partly, because of the collective social response to the pandemic. One major source of hardships that people experience arises due to collective efforts to flatten the curve or otherwise mitigate spread of the disease. For example, in the United States, many restaurants, bars, and businesses have been shuttered. While many white collar employees are able to telework, others have been unable to work, thus forgoing an income. Similarly, most schools in the United States have been closed. Consequently, many students have missed educational opportunities as well as opportunities to socialize with their peers. Under‐served families have been deprived of additional vital services like free or reduced‐price lunches and free childcare, or they lack the means to effectively participate in distance learning (Faden 2020 ; New York Times 2020 ). Finally, others deemed “essential workers” continue to work, but at much higher risk and no increase in compensation.

The costs imposed by this collective response to the pandemic complicate the ethics of giving. In addition to the pandemic itself generating additional needs, some are in need because they have taken on certain burdens as part of this collective response to the outbreak. Some commentators have even compared our current situation to that of wartime mobilization (see, e.g., Nevins 2020 ). People are making sacrifices in order to help produce benefits for the community as a whole. The benefits of social distancing are collective because they are non‐excludable: if anyone in a community enjoys reduced transmission rates in a then so does everyone else in that community (cf. Ostrom and Ostrom 2015 , 7). If every participant in this collective effort to mitigate the pandemic were subject to a fair distribution of burdens and benefits, then perhaps duties of aid would still be the most relevant ones when thinking about the ethics of giving money. Yet these burdens and benefits are distributed unfairly.

The fact that some are making greater sacrifices than others for the sake of the good of the entire community suggests a shift in our ethical point of view. Rather than viewing the ethics of giving in response to COVID‐19 solely as acting on duty of aid in response to a disaster, we should view it from the lens of fairness. To the extent that we benefit from the sacrifices of others without similarly being asked to sacrifice ourselves, we ought to do what we can to lessen their burdens. Giving is not merely a matter of beneficence, but rather one of reciprocity.

3. RECIPROCITY AND FAIR COMPENSATION DURING COVID‐19

The basic notion of reciprocity that we wish to advance involves not “gain[ing] from the cooperative labors of others without doing our fair share” (Rawls 1999b , 17; cf. Klosko 2004 ). To illustrate this notion, imagine a small town currently faces the risk of an unexpected drought. In order to ensure that the community has access to sufficient potable water, each resident is required to refrain from watering their lawns or their plants. The community largely complies with this rule and, as a result, the community's common supply of potable water is not depleted. In this context, we will assume that it would be morally objectionable for you to free ride by watering your lawn. Your violation of the water usage restriction would be objectionable because you would be taking advantage of the cooperative sacrifices voluntarily undertaken by others by enjoying the benefits of access to potable water without doing your fair share in conserving it. In the context of the pandemic, there is a clear analog. Social distancing during a pandemic is like observing watering restrictions during a drought. We frequently hear public health experts and media influencers enjoining us to “do our part” by social distancing, thereby contributing to the effort to ensure that we all enjoy the benefits of reduced transmission rates and a flattened curve. 1 According to this rationale, those who are able but refuse to socially distance might very well end up enjoying those benefits, but they will not have done their fair share. They are guilty of free‐riding. 2

In the drought example, imagine that some members of the community are botanists who need to water plants in order to make a living whereas others enjoy having a beautiful lawn. All else being equal, it seems unfairly burdensome for the botanists if they were required to forego watering plants. And if we accept that these burdens are unfair, there are a few intuitive types of remedies. The first would be to relax water restrictions, thereby allowing everyone to water the plants. This response would not unfairly burden botanists, but it would deplete the water supply. A second response would involve carving out an exception to the rule to ensure it was not unduly burdensome. The botanists might receive exemptions that permit them to water more than the rest of the community. While watering privileges would then be distributed unequally, they would not obviously be distributed unfairly. Indeed, an equal distribution of watering privileges would be especially burdensome for botanists, and would perhaps be unfair as a result. A third kind of response would involve compensating the botanists. The other members of the community could start a fund to pay for the loss of revenue the botanist would experience from compliance with watering restrictions.

Analogously, in our current context, we have been enjoined to socially distance to promote various goods for the community. For some people, especially those who have to forego educational or economic opportunities, these costs are unequal. Furthermore, some members of the community might be understood as bearing unfair burdens for the sake of producing a benefit for the community as a whole. A similar point applies to the distribution of benefits from promoting the community's good. If some people benefit much more than others when it comes to the production of a public good, then this will also influence our sense of what constitutes their fair share of the burdens. Reducing transmission rates will benefit those especially at risk from the virus or those who are more likely to need emergency services when there is a shortage of hospital beds. COVID‐19 has a much higher case fatality rate for those from older age groups than younger age groups. Children are far less likely to die from COVID‐19 than those fifty and older (CDC 2020 ). If we were to consider those benefits alone, then older generations stand to benefit more than young children from social distancing measures. Overall, children take on significant burdens in the form of school closures, yet enjoy the direct benefits of social distancing far less than other members of our society.

A similar point applies to those who take on exceptional risks for the sake of the common good by continuing to work. In these cases, workers remain employed and paid for the services that they provide. Perhaps they are not compensated enough , however, given the extraordinary circumstances they find themselves in. So perhaps they are entitled to hazard pay. People facing additional risks normally rely on markets to set their wages. The rationale for giving to them is to make up for difficulties in re‐negotiating their wages or other perquisites (such as job security) during a emergency and a time of high unemployment. And this rationale resonates with many people; there is a call to give these workers their “fair share” (Allen 2020 ) or to “take care” of those who have “taken care of us” (Stewart 2020 ). We are also regularly enjoined to give larger tips to service workers or assist medical workers who get sick or experience financial trouble relocating to areas where they are most needed.

The upshot of this discussion is that our collective response to the pandemic has involved some bearing unfair costs for the sake of the good of the community as a whole. 3 Given that social distancing measures distribute benefits and burdens unfairly, what should we do? As illustrated by the water restrictions example, three intuitive responses emerge when a rule provides a benefit to a community but is unfair. First, some might argue that, given the unfairness involved, we should abandon policies intended to mitigate the pandemic, by, e.g., unshuttering businesses or opening schools. Whether reopening is, in fact, an appropriate response will depend on a host of factors beyond the scope of this paper. In some circumstances, however, reopening will not be justifiable given the terrible epidemiological consequences. Fairness is not the only value that matters when assessing a response to a pandemic and must be weighed against the bad outcomes of a worsened COVID‐19 transmission rate (Bernstein, et al., 2020 ). Even many of the countries that have seen success at social distancing are now experiencing second waves of the virus (Parra 2020 ). Accordingly, for the rest of this paper we will assume that either reopening is not morally justifiable; or, if it is morally justifiable, the question of how to make the distribution of benefits and burdens of social distancing fairer remains relevant since reopening has not, in fact, occurred.

The second way to make the burdens and benefits of social distancing fairer would involve issuing exemptions. Here it is worth drawing a parallel to a different proposal, namely, “immunity passports” (Kofler and Baylis 2020 ). According to this proposal, individuals who can demonstrate immunity will receive permission to bypass ordinary restrictions on social distancing. Similarly, those for whom social distancing is unfairly burdensome could be issued “unfairly burdened passports” (UBPs), which would permit them to return to work or school, while those for whom it is not burdensome would be required to remain at home. There are several problems, however, with this proposal.

First, governments would face challenges in determining who qualifies as unfairly burdened. The US government has failed to adequately compensate those who have been unfairly burdened by the pandemic, and, as we argue in section 5, there may be epistemic challenges states face in principle in ensuring distributive fairness during pandemics. A similar concern has been noted for issuing immunity passports: states lack the surveillance capacity to determine who, in fact has immunity, and who lacks it (Kofler and Baylis 2020 ). The difficulties for UBPs would be even worse, since issuing UBPs will run up against limits of the state's epistemic capabilities to monitor non‐compliance as well as normative disagreements over who counts as unfairly burdened.

A second, related, problem is that UBPs would generate a perverse incentive on the part of those who are not unfairly burdened to demonstrate that they are unfairly burdened. If only a few people act on this kind of perverse incentive, the results may be relatively harmless—albeit unfair—since those who are not unfairly burdened would receive special dispensation as though they were. If enough people act on this incentive, however, then too many UBPs would be issued, undermining the epidemiological benefits of social distancing in the first place.

Third, UBPs would not even alleviate the relevant burdens facing people who are actually unfairly burdened by reduced incomes from social distancing. For example, allowing those who are disadvantaged to go back to work will not ensure that they are, in fact, able to work, because social distancing creates a supply problem and a demand problem. It does no good to allow low income service workers to go back to work if restaurants are closed and hotels are at limited capacity. To be truly effective, special dispensation would also have to be given to potential consumers of services provided by those who are issued UBPs in order to work, and this would be tantamount to ending social distancing.

A third proposal to reduce the unfair burdens of social distancing would be to compensate those who have had to bear them in order to promote the common good. Because social distancing measures have been unfairly burdensome for certain individuals, we might think they are owed compensation from those of us who have not borne comparable burdens— such as those of us who have continued to telework or enjoy educational opportunities but nonetheless benefited from the major sacrifices of others. Moreover, this proposal would not compromise the epidemiological gains of our collective response or encounter the problems we have identified with UBPs.

So far, we have argued that, when thinking about giving away money in the current pandemic, it would be incomplete if one were to merely consider the needs that arise due to the pandemic itself. One should also consider the benefits and burdens that arise from our collective response to the pandemic. Many Americans have engaged in a collective effort to try to reduce the rate of transmission for our entire community. They have radically altered their way of life to protect all of us. Yet the costs and benefits from this radical change have not been distributed fairly. Therefore, compensation is owed to those who have borne unfair burdens or have benefited far less than others in the community.

4. Unfair Burdens and Compounding Injustice

Who bears unfair burdens during the pandemic? In this section, we note two morally salient dimensions of this question: whether the burdens in question are absolute or relative, and whether they have been caused by injustices.

To begin with absolute and relative burdens, one might claim those who have lost the most are most entitled to compensation. In particular, it may seem that those who have lost the most in absolute monetary terms are those who are most entitled to compensation. But this is implausible for two reasons. First, determining who lost the most is complicated. For example, it may be unclear how we should weigh the loss of educational opportunities and social services for children against economic costs or lost employment. Second, those who have experienced the greatest loss in monetary terms do not necessarily correspond to those who have borne the greatest burdens. A poll tax of $1,000 from each citizen or resident will be more burdensome for the least well‐off members of society than the wealthiest, even though the wealthiest members of society are taxed the same amount. Similarly, even though a company like Shake Shack might suffer larger financial losses in absolute terms than smaller restaurants during this time, shareholders of Shake Shack have not been burdened more than owners of smaller, independent restaurants. This in part explains the condemnation the company received for accepting loans intended to support small businesses through the Paycheck Protection Program before agreeing to give them back (Yaffe‐Bellany 2020 ).

The second dimension of fairness concerns the source of the benefits and burdens of some policy or set of policies. Some burdens are due to injustice. These burdens should not be assessed in the same way as other kinds of burdens. For example, imagine that, due to existing injustices, someone is born in an environment in which she is more exposed to air pollution than other members of the community. She develops asthma as a consequence. In her society, there is government‐provided health insurance although people have to pay higher premiums for pre‐existing conditions. Insisting that this person should have to bear the costs of her illness or pay higher premiums amounts to insisting she should bear additional burdens precisely because she is a victim of injustice. 4 Intuitively, this seems unfair.

This example highlights that it would be deeply morally problematic to claim that individuals are obligated, as a matter of fairness, to take on additional burdens that arise due to past or ongoing injustices in a way that compounds them. An injustice is compounded when one has to bear a new burden in virtue of unrectified injustices.

This point about compounding injustice applies to the present context because individuals from low‐income backgrounds, African Americans, Latinx individuals, and Native peoples have all been especially burdened by the pandemic. 5 Individuals from these socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic groups disproportionately lack access to of jobs that allow for teleworking, and thus are disproportionately unemployed due to social distancing or face great risk as essential workers. They are disproportionately deprived of educational opportunities that enable access to those jobs. Distance learning is especially burdensome for children from families that experience background social injustice—due to the lack of access to laptops, fast internet connections, or the ability of their parents to provide care during the day while schools are closed (Van Lancker and Parolin 2020 ). Children from lower social economic status households may be particularly burdened by the loss of instructional time more generally, leading to a loss of learning retention (Doyle 2020 ). In short, many individuals have been especially burdened by the response to the pandemic because of historical and ongoing injustices. The pandemic has compounded these pre‐pandemic injustices.

Importantly, individuals from these social, racial, and ethnic groups are also disproportionately suffering the effects of the pandemic itself (Knittel and Ozaltun 2020 ; Ford, Reber, and Reeves 2020 ; Begley 2020 ). So while the collective response to the pandemic is especially burdensome for these individuals, they also stand to benefit a great deal from it. Indeed some object to ending social distancing measures precisely because they worry these disadvantaged individuals will be especially harmed by the consequent rise in transmission of the virus (Serwer 2020 ). One might object, then, that many individuals disadvantaged by pre‐pandemic injustices are the primary beneficiaries of our collective response to the pandemic. So, perhaps, the benefits and burdens of our collective responses are distributed fairly, after all, and considerations of reciprocity do not entitle these individuals to compensation.

In reply, part of the reason why individuals from these backgrounds have higher rates of COVID‐19 is because they work essential jobs where the risk of exposure is higher than, say, for those who telework (Hawkins 2020 ). As discussed, some of these individuals are already taking on burdens for the common good in the form of heightened risk of contracting the disease—rather than being individuals who stand to benefit especially from social distancing.

Second, and more fundamentally, the concern about compounding injustice applies not only to burdens but also to benefits. The reason why individuals from these groups have died in higher numbers is precisely due to serious background injustices—such as: being disproportionately employed as essential workers at heightened risk; not being able to take time off from work; enjoying inadequate medical care (often due to prejudice or stigma); or living in areas that are more likely to cause certain health conditions that exacerbate the disease, such as asthma or hypertension (Braveman et al. 2010 ; Owen, Carmona, and Pomeroy 2020 ; Shonkoff and Williams 2020 ; Wadhera, Wadhera, and Gaba 2020 ). So even if we grant that social distancing is, in absolute terms, very beneficial for members of these groups given the grave threat the novel coronavirus poses to them, this is largely due to pre‐pandemic injustices that placed them in conditions where they were unfairly at risk from the pandemic.

Our argument, then, is twofold. First, when determining whether the benefits and burdens that accompany social distancing are fair, we should take into account burdens relative to one's overall resources or opportunities. This counts against just looking at burdens or benefits in absolute terms. Second, we should also look at the source of burdens and benefits. Some individuals who shoulder especially large burdens during this time do so because of persistent injustices. To proceed as though the losses those individuals experience constitute their “fair share” would compound injustices that existed prior to the pandemic.

Accordingly, when we think about whether the distribution and burdens and benefits accompanying social distancing are fair, we should pay special attention to those who are from less advantaged backgrounds and who are burdened due to injustice. When combined with the conclusion of the previous section—that those of us who are not unfairly burdened have duties of fairness to compensate those who are—we arrive at the main thesis of this paper: we are obligated to compensate those members of our community who are burdened for the sake of our collective benefit because they come from less advantaged backgrounds, especially those who are burdened due to historical and ongoing injustice.

Fully specifying who counts as most unfairly burdened in the relevant way and what priority they should be assigned is beyond the scope of this paper. We have pointed to various age, social, economic, racial, and ethnic groups that have been especially burdened, in no small part because of unrectified pre‐pandemic injustices. To fully determine who has been most unfairly burdened would require further articulating competing views of justice and delving deeper into the details of the kinds of hardships different individuals have undergone during the pandemic. Nonetheless, by indicating that the obligation in question is one of reciprocity and making clear how this pandemic has compounded injustice, we have provided initial guidelines for determining who has been unfairly burdened by the pandemic and thereby would appear to have claims to compensation as a matter of reciprocity. The final determination will depend on contentious normative issues about which people will disagree, as well as empirical complexities that will be difficult to resolve.

Nonetheless, to illustrate how one might go about making this final determination, we will discuss a particular case: young children, especially those who are underserved. While young children do face real risks from the coronavirus, they appear to be subject to less risk than older age groups—and so they do not (directly) benefit as much as others from social distancing (CDC 2020 ; Milstone 2020 ). At the same time, these children are missing educational opportunities at especially formative stages in their development. Children from underserved backgrounds also bear additional burdens. They often lack the requisite technology to effectively engage in distance learning. They also have less reliable access to social services provided by their school—medical care, childcare, free lunch, and so on (Faden 2020 ). That social distancing is burdening children in these ways suggests that when providing compensation, these children have a powerful claim on grounds of reciprocity.

Presumably, cash transfers directly to children would not be especially effective at remedying these burdens. But there are other ways to give to compensate them—for instance, by giving to charities to ensure that these children have access to meals or the requisite technology to engage in distance learning, or that provide other measures that can offset the unfair burdens these children bear.

5. INDIVIDUAL AND INSTITUTIONAL RESPONSES

In the previous three sections, we have argued that benefits and burdens of social distancing are unfairly distributed. We have argued that this unfair distribution ought to be remedied, and have indicated that those who are unfairly burdened have especially strong claims to compensation. But it does not follow from this argument that individuals who are relatively unburdened by social distancing have an obligation to help those who are disproportionately burdened through direct assistance. One possibility is that institutions, such as government agencies, should be providing this kind of assistance, rather than individuals.

Governments have an important role to play in helping to secure terms of social cooperation that are fair according to norms of reciprocity. One component of that role is to facilitate the production of collective goods, such as a reduced viral transmission rate acquired through social distancing, by making it more difficult to free ride. One might cogently reason that one would benefit from others' efforts to socially distance, since this would reduce the overall transmission rate, without being willing to give anything up by social distancing oneself. States attempt to keep this kind of free‐riding in check by legally mandating that certain businesses close, as well as sanctioning individuals who violate social distancing rules.

Governments also have a role in helping to alleviate the burdens some experience through social distancing. Many have provided economic assistance to households that are likely to be hit the hardest by the response to the pandemic. In these cases, the state is addressing a motivational problem on the part of private individuals: many would not help those who are disproportionately burdened by our collective response to the pandemic, while taking advantage of their sacrifices. The government's financing of assistance through taxation makes this assistance mandatory, thus helping to solve the problem of assurance that others will help to discharge our shared responsibilities toward one another.

The United States government has provided $1,200 in assistance through the CARES Act to individuals earning under $75,000 a year, with a graduated reduction in benefits for those earning beyond that amount. While this policy has been referred to as a “stimulus,” the policy is better understood as assistance, for two reasons. First, the government's aim has not been for consumers to rush out and purchase goods and services from businesses that are actually made vulnerable because of social distancing. Those businesses are closed or seeing less business precisely because of social distancing. Second, the assistance was means‐tested, which might be a reasonable approach if the aim is to direct funds to those with lower incomes, but less‐than‐ideal if the aim was to get checks out sooner to stimulate spending and resist an economic downturn. Means‐testing substantially slows down broad‐based cash payments to individuals, because those without tax returns from the previous year have to file before they qualify for checks. Economic research suggests that the speed at which individuals receive assistance, as well as its automaticity and whether it is a direct cash payment or a tax rebate, substantially influences the degree to which it changes consumer spending behavior (Sahm 2019 ; Sahm, Shapiro, and Slemrod 2012 ). Instead, the CARES Act funds to households are better understood as a form of economic aid, while millions are facing financially precarious conditions (cf. Enda, Gale, and Haldeman 2020 ). 6

While assistance through the CARES Act has been targeted to some extent, however, this targeting has been quite rough‐grained. This is because governments face a difficult epistemic problem when attempting to assess who is experiencing greater burdens because of social distancing. Not all employees who make similar wages are similarly burdened by social distancing. A graduate teaching assistant earning a PhD in economics is likely in a less dire position financially than a single parent earning the same income from a low wage job. Some households experience higher debt than others or have difficult needs that the government cannot easily target. And, as we have mentioned, some workers are able to safely telework from home, while others experience layoffs, and some children have access to resources that make remote education far more feasible for them than for less advantaged children. When considering what obligations individuals have to assist others through giving money beyond the efforts by the state at correcting for the disproportionate burdens experienced by some from social distancing, it is important to note the limitations to what the state is capable of knowing about the hardships faced by particular individuals, and who would possess this kind of knowledge. In many cases, individuals are in a better epistemic position to recognize whether they are unduly burdened by social distancing than the state is, and so in a better position to know that economic assistance would be better targeted helping others.

The fact that the government has only a limited ability to predict who exactly is most burdened by social distancing and will need assistance is a deep problem. The relevant information includes not only predictions about individuals' economic behavior, but also about their preferences and expectations. To assess the degree to which someone is burdened by social distancing, the government would have to know whether working from home is an adequate substitute for their working in an office, whether they have other options if they are unable to work, to what degree they depend on having access to childcare, the tolerance for experiencing a greater risk of getting sick, and whether or not they have important life plans and milestones that are interrupted by having their options removed under social distancing. States face obstacles in gathering this kind of information. This is similar to the problem central planners face in a non‐market economy in attempting to efficiently allocate scarce resources, since information about individuals' preferences and trade‐offs are normally gathered through economic exchange (Hayek 1945 ). A government's efforts to target financial assistance will necessarily be rough‐grained, given its epistemic limitations about knowing the degree to which someone has been burdened by social distancing. It will predictably generate false positives, by giving to some people who have not seen financial hardship or a loss of income due to the crisis; and it will generate false negatives, because it fails to compensate some who are profoundly burdened by the policies.

Individuals generally do, however, have the relevant kind of information available regarding themselves. The obligations of reciprocity that governments help address are ultimately obligations members of society owe to each other, and so they bear some responsibility for helping to discharge them when the state predictably fails to do so. These obligations do not cease to exist simply because the state fails to enable individuals to fulfill them. Indeed, on at least certain influential views of the grounds of state authority, such as Joseph Raz's service conception, the state's authority arises in virtue of the state's ability to enable individuals to discharge their obligations to each other (or do what they have most moral reason to do). 7 Put simply, the state helps us to fulfill certain obligations of reciprocity, but it is not the case that these obligations exist only if the state succeeds in helping us to discharge them.

Many people are aware that they are not burdened by social distancing, either because it does not frustrate many opportunities of sufficient quality that they may wish to take or because they are not being asked to take on excessive risk in their daily lives. 8 Those who are not burdened can give to charitable organizations, which often possess local knowledge of what kinds of needs are being generated in a community (homelessness, food insecurity), the different preferences of members of the community, as well as expertise regarding how best to satisfy those needs and preferences (Kingma 1997 ). Individuals may also possess information unavailable to governments regarding how to assess the needs of neighbors, family members, or individuals to whom they can provide direct cash transfers.

Those who receive relief money because the state misallocated it to them, by failing to register that they are not particularly burdened by social distancing, have an obligation to see to it that the money goes to those who are disproportionately burdened. Indeed, it is (in some sense) not their money to keep, since it is only the result of a failure on the part of the state to help us discharge the obligations members of society have toward one another that they receive it at all. Some recipients of a stimulus check who have donated the money have expressly said they don't view the check as “their money” (Albrecht 2020 ). Our argument suggests one way to explain why these people are right: keeping the money would be unfair to those who are disproportionately burdened. Giving one's stimulus check to those who are disproportionately burdened amounts to helping the government do its job by correcting for its mistakes. 9

6. Responses to Objections

Before concluding, we consider three objections. First, it may seem that our claim that individuals have an obligation to correct for failures of distributive justice over‐generalizes. It may seem as though our view implies a general prescription of vigilante distributive justice, so that individuals who pay too little taxes than would be obligated to donate their tax refunds to those in need. Second, while we have couched the argument in this paper in terms of discharging duties of reciprocity toward one another in the production of a collective good (reduced viral transmission rates) rather than as providing assistance or discharging a duty of rescue to those suffering the most, it may seem like the obligations individuals have to assist those who are worst‐off globally are more stringent than these requirements of reciprocity, and so should take priority over them. Third, we have claimed that the obligations individuals have toward others burdened by the social response to the pandemic are primarily owed to other members of one's community, i.e., conationals. This claim, however, could be challenged: it may be better to view the response to the pandemic as global. Individuals, especially those in less affluent countries, may be facing the most severe burdens from attempts to reduce the overall viral transmission rate globally, and it may seem that individuals who disproportionately benefit from those efforts (especially those living in relatively well‐off countries) ought to compensate them. We answer each of these objections in turn.

6.1. Vigilante Distributive Justice

We argued in section 5 that governments have predictably failed to compensate those who have borne unfair burdens from the social response to the pandemic. But this point may seem to apply to all instances of need‐based assistance that the state provides. If the state is not particularly good at determining who is greatly burdened by the social response to the pandemic, then should we think that it will do a much better job with respect to other natural disasters, such as hurricanes or floods, or for other social problems like poverty? It may seem like this point would generalize to other domains as well, and individuals who are unfairly benefited by the tax code have an obligation to donate their refund to those who are unfairly worse off than they are. Without rejecting this conclusion, we do not think that our argument in this paper has this implication for two reasons.

First social distancing raises a particularly difficult epistemic problem for the state with respect to compensating people in need. So, we should expect the state to misallocate relief assistance to a greater degree than with respect to other crises, and for more individuals to receive assistance without being disproportionately burdened. In the case of assistance in response to weather events like hurricanes, the state's epistemic challenges are more tractable. Government agencies can model how many people's homes will be destroyed in a given area, how long they would take to rebuild, and how much insurance market assistance would be needed to encourage rebuilding. For the most part, people's preferences to live in homes on the coast that are not destroyed by hurricanes do not change (Binder, Baker, and Barile, 2015 ). The economic burdens of social distancing, however, are more difficult to predict, because the economic damage is caused by changes in people's preferences and behaviors. The state will struggle to anticipate how much risk an individual household is willing to take on, or should be willing to take on, before going back to work. Since the pandemic is likely to persist for some indeterminate period of time, the state cannot predict how this will change people's preferences for where to work, what kinds of businesses to patronize, or what kind of communities they want to live in. Because people's preferences and behaviors are shaped in unpredictable ways by social distancing, the state cannot easily predict need on the basis of the crisis. Additionally, there is a significant lag in the data that the state can draw on to assess need: it can use income reported in past tax returns to predict who will be neediest, but, obviously, people's financial conditions may have changed since and will be affected by the crisis. 10

The second response is just to bite the bullet about the state's ability to gather fine‐grained information about the extent to which members of society are burdened by disasters. States do not have an enviable epistemic position when assessing the degree of burden or need individuals have that would entitle them to compensation. This does not mean that the state should get out of the business of trying to alleviate burdens caused by disasters altogether. It should simply be recognized that its attempts to do so will inevitably be less precise than would be ideal, sometimes helping those who are not particularly burdened and sometimes failing to adequately help those who are. In many cases, individuals who are disproportionately benefited relative to the burdens they have experienced from a natural disaster should look for ways to help those most burdened in their community, and this is an obligation grounded in reciprocity.

Relatedly, our view does not imply that individuals have general obligations to correct for failures of the state to secure fair terms of social cooperation by, e.g., donating their tax refunds to those who are unfairly burdened by social policy more generally (including some of the pre‐pandemic injustices we have discussed in this paper). The problems of distributive justice that modern democracies face are not best understood as a series of one‐off disasters that the state must correct for, but instead as terms of ongoing social cooperation that may better or worse realize the ideal of reciprocity. Additionally, the state does not face as daunting of a knowledge problem in its obligations of distributive justice toward members of society, since the distributive consequences of its policies are often more familiar to policymakers, and so are either knowable in advance or something that can be discovered through experimentation and revision of social policy. 11 Because the demands of distributive justice are ongoing and predictable, normally, ensuring a fairer distribution of benefits and burdens through social cooperation more generally is probably best achieved through advocacy through the state rather than through vigilante redistribution. Even if individuals do have obligations of distributive justice toward one another directly, it may be that the best way to discharge those obligations is through participation within and the promotion of just institutions rather than direct cash transfers to make up for the limitations of state action. By contrast, the COVID‐19 pandemic is a sudden, difficult‐to‐predict crisis. Even if individuals ought to advocate for a fairer public response to the differential burdens for future pandemics, they still have obligations to their fellow members of society who are burdened by the demands of social distancing to reduce the threat of disease to themselves.

6.2. Duties of Assistance Versus Duties of Reciprocity

One might question the assumption that obligations of reciprocity ought to take priority during a disaster like a global pandemic. While conationals are being burdened in order to reduce the viral transmission rate, it may seem that we have especially stringent obligations—even in non‐pandemic conditions—to assist those who are worst‐off, such as those experiencing dire poverty or preventable diseases like malaria, and that we have stronger reasons to provide aid to these people than to discharge our obligations of reciprocity to others in our community who are social distancing.

For instance, Peter Singer ( 1974 ) has forcefully made the case that problems like global poverty and malaria are dire, that individuals in wealthy countries are able to save lives by giving money directly to alleviate these problems, and that individuals have an obligation to do so if they can without giving up something of significant moral worth. Even while social distancing and during a pandemic, most Americans are better off than those who experiencing severe poverty (the roughly 9.2% of the world's population living below the World Bank's poverty threshold of $1.90 a day; World Bank 2018 ) or who live in malaria‐stricken regions. It may seem that assisting them is more urgent than giving to other Americans, especially given that low‐income countries have been hit quite hard by the pandemic (Walker 2020 ). In this section, however, we provide some reasons for why one should think that the duty of rescue does not undermine our claim that individuals have a pro tanto obligation to help conationals burdened by the pandemic.

First, while the duty of rescue may be particularly stringent, obligations grounded in reciprocity imply that others have claims in virtue of these obligations. These claims constrain how we may fulfill duties of rescue. Normally, it is only permissible to discharge a duty of rescue with resources that are rightfully one's own. For example, it is generally acknowledged to be impermissible to steal money to donate to programs that reduce malaria aid to the world's poorest ( pace Unger 1996 , ch. 3) While duties of reciprocity may not be as absolute as the duty not to steal, they—along with debts and promissory obligations—do determine what is rightfully one's own and what one owes others. Our argument in this paper is that the state has failed in its role to help us discharge our obligations of reciprocity to others to compensate them for the production of a collective good, a reduced viral transmission rate, and those excessively burdened by this policy are owed compensation. This means that others have a stronger claim to at least some of our resources than we do, and this should be taken into account before deciding to use those resources for other purposes, even when donating to global charities. 12

Second, however, the priority of obligations of reciprocity should not be taken to imply that these obligations can never be overridden by more urgent duties of rescue. Even if, in some cases, there is an obligation to provide assistance to those who are neediest, even outside of one's community, this would only show that the obligation to rescue is overridden, not that it does not exist (for this distinction, see Feinberg 1978 , 102). If donating to the world's neediest is more urgent, recognition of the outweighed, but undefeated, obligations conationals have toward one another may require recognition in the form of an apology or some other attempt to make amends. In any case, it would not be permissible to do one's fair share in donating to the world's neediest and then to simply ignore the obligations one has toward conationals who have borne the costs of the social response to the pandemic.

6.3. Reciprocity Beyond Borders

Even if one accepts that obligations of reciprocity are especially significant, one might nonetheless arrive at the conclusion that giving should aim to help non‐conationals. Viruses, like people, cross borders, and it may seem that the rate at which COVID‐19 spreads is better understood as a global phenomenon. People in other countries who are required to socially distance or who are restricted from crossing international borders are being asked to take on burdens that contribute to a global collective good: a less severe pandemic. So it may seem that the obligations of reciprocity we have highlighted should be understood as global in scope as well.

This debate has parallels to a fundamental debate in global justice theorizing. Some theories of global justice are statist, in the sense that they hold that duties of justice (including those grounded in reciprocity) apply almost exclusively to conationals (cf. Rawls 1999a ; Blake 2001 ). According to these views, individuals may have duties to provide assistance to those who live in burdened societies to help meet their basic needs or to protect their human rights. Obligations of justice, however, are primarily owed to conationals in virtue of living under a state that mutually coerces its members or because national communities delineate communities in which economic and social cooperation take place. Some cosmopolitan theories of justice, by contrast, hold that there is a “global basic structure,” and so mutual economic cooperation and coercion occur between non‐conationals (Pogge 1994 , Beitz 1999 , 143‐53; Tan 2004 , 26‐29). According to these views, obligations of justice are owed globally. If these cosmopolitan theories are correct, then it may be that the global basic structure fails to fairly distribute the costs of the response to the global pandemic, and so individuals have an obligation to correct for this failure, not by donating to those who are burdened in their own societies, but to those who are most unfairly burdened globally. While we do not assume that obligations of justice are, in general, owed exclusively to conationals, there are several reasons for thinking that our obligations to compensate those burdened by the social response to the pandemic are primarily owed to conationals.

First, the most unfairly burdened countries in the world are not necessarily the ones that, in the context of the pandemic, are bearing the greatest burdens to provide a global epidemiological benefit. The global justice theorists we mention identify injustice‐caused burdens in the international context. Yet our arguments have focused on two sorts of considerations. The first is the burdens people have borne, especially burdens that have been compounded by injustice. The second is the benefit these individuals have provided us by social distancing or continuing to work despite being at high risk. For our reciprocity‐based argument to yield the conclusion that we should be giving internationally, one would need to provide evidence that the unfair burdens these countries bear in response to the pandemic are burdens they bear that provide people in other countries with the relevant kind of collective benefit.

And, second, there are reasons to doubt that unfairly burdened individuals abroad are also the ones providing benefits by socially distancing. Since transmission rates of coronavirus do not correlate strongly by country (given that most global transit is temporarily closed), social distancing in one country primarily benefits only the people in that country by helping to lower the transmission rate there. That is, it would appear that Americans who socially distance by being out of work are primarily helping to reduce the risk of the virus spreading to other Americans or causing various hospitals in the United States to be overrun, rather than reducing these risks in other countries. Accordingly the benefits of social distancing appear primarily to be local. So, it is well‐motivated to focus on local benefits and burdens associated with the collective effort to mitigate the spread of the novel coronavirus at home. Moreover, epidemiological models of the effects of social distancing assume closed borders, and do not attempt to account for the effects of social distancing on other countries (Hsiang et al. 2020 ). So, it is at least a credible assumption, given what we now know about the spread of COVID‐19, that travel across borders is not presently a main driver of viral spread within countries.

Third, our argument does not entail that the local obligations of reciprocity are the only obligations we have, nor that they override all other obligations. Let us grant the cosmopolitan position that individuals have obligations of reciprocity to residents of other countries in virtue of how the global economic order has unfairly burdened them while benefitting others. It does not follow from this that these obligations override all other obligations of reciprocity, including domestic ones. Our claim is merely that the pandemic has given rise to a particular set of obligations of reciprocity; we do not claim to have shown that these local obligations of reciprocity override or outweigh all other obligations. As we saw in the previous section, it is beyond the scope of this paper to try to demonstrate that these local obligations necessarily override all other obligations.

Fourth, as we have noted, there are already epistemic difficulties in determining who, exactly, has taken on the greatest burdens, even if we constrain our focus to the domestic context. These epistemic difficulties become that much more vexing once we consider the question on a global scale and the relevant counterfactuals. For instance, perhaps the pandemic would have been much worse were it not for the burdens undertaken by many citizens in China during the early phase of the pandemic, burdens that compounded injustices there. Determining how much worse the pandemic would have been were it not for this effort is difficult. More importantly, while there are effective charities and NGOs for various kinds of international giving, it's far less clear that such organizations exist for this purpose—that is, for compensating citizens in other countries in virtue of unfair burdens they have undertaken in order to provide us with some sort of epidemiological benefit. While we have argued that citizens in the domestic context often have forms of knowledge about who is in need, knowledge that their government lacks, we should not think that this point applies internationally. Indeed, there are reasons to doubt that citizens have the relevant kind of information.

There are, however, two conciliatory points worth noting here. First, if it turns out to be the case that social distancing or other burdensome measures by non‐conationals are or have been a major causal factor in providing global benefits, then they would also have a claim to assistance from those they have benefitted. In some cases, such a verdict might be plausible. For example, if the widespread destruction of poultry in China helps reduce the risk of an avian flu pandemic but burdens Chinese farmers, then these farmers may be owed assistance, not only by their Chinese conationals, but also from people in affluent countries who benefit from their sacrifices. Additionally, if early social distancing in Wuhan helped reduce the global transmission rate of COVID‐19, but imposed substantial burdens on residents of the city, then it may be that they have a claim of reciprocity from people across the globe. 13

Second, prospective migrants may be an exception to our general claim that duties of reciprocity in response to the pandemic have imposed disproportionate burdens, sometimes unfairly, on vulnerable populations such as refugees and those in low‐income countries seeking to migrate for better economic prospects. Because international travel has been sharply curtailed in order to isolate cases in one country from spilling over into another, potential migrants are particularly burdened in order to reduce transmission rates of the virus. Even if, as we have suggested, a strong case cannot be made that individuals generally have duties of reciprocity to assist those disproportionately burdened by social distancing and other transmission‐reduction policies outside of their own countries, the case that they have obligations to those who have a claim to cross borders but are not allowed to—including refugees and some other migrants—is much stronger.

7. CONCLUSION

The arguments in this paper have addressed the ethics of giving in response to the COVID‐19 pandemic. We have argued, first, that such giving is not merely a matter of acting on one's duty of aid. This is because many of the devastating losses people are experiencing are not due to COVID‐19 itself. Rather, some such devastating losses have also accompanied the collective efforts at mitigation. Such collective effort has involved significant sacrifices, especially those that accompany social distancing. These sacrifices have produced various community‐wide benefits such as reduced transmission rates and a flattened curve. Yet, while these benefits are vital, the burdens of the collective endeavor have not been borne equally. Indeed, the pandemic itself and the costs of social distancing have fallen disproportionately on less advantaged members of our society—in many cases, members of our society who are less advantaged due to historical and ongoing injustices. This is not merely tragic; it is profoundly unfair.

Most governments have failed to adequately ensure that citizens fulfill their obligations of reciprocity to those who have borne unfair burdens. Moreover, we have given reasons to think they will continue to fail in doing so. Accordingly, it falls on individuals to fulfill these obligations of reciprocity. Fully specifying how we should go about doing so will need to be sensitive to further empirical considerations that we do not have room to address. In the meantime, however, we have hopefully helped readers to think through how they should go about giving away money during the pandemic.

8. Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Brian Hutler, the audience at a workshop at the Berman Institute of Bioethics at John Hopkins University, and two anonymous referees for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Pierce Randall and Justin Bernstein have contributed equally to this paper.

See, for example, Maragakis 2020 , Virginia Department of Health 2020 , and WBIR 2020 .

Some, such as Robert Nozick, have argued that in such circumstances one is not obligated to contribute to the good. See, esp., Nozick 1974 . Yet, as others have argued, Nozick’s examples involve trivial public goods. Reducing transmission rates or flattening the curve presumably are not trivial public goods. See Moller 2018 , 74‐75; Klosko 1987 ; 2004 . Indeed, they qualify as what Klosko labels ”indispensable goods,” public goods that are analogs to what Rawls labels primary goods—goods that any reasonable person would want, regardless of whatever else they want; Klosko 1987 , 246 and Klosko 2004 , 32. Of course, some staunch libertarians may remain unconvinced that individuals have this duty of fairness even in the face of a pandemic like the current one. However, our arguments are not aimed at persuading staunch libertarians.

One could arrive at this conclusion despite disagreeing about the exact nature of the burdens and benefits of this collective response. For example, some (e.g., Rawls 1999c , Daniels 2008 ) might draw on resourcist views and construe the burdens of social distancing solely in terms of lost economic or educational opportunities, whereas others (e.g., Robeyns 2016 ) might spell out the burdens in terms of the frustration of preferences or the loss of basic capabilities.

A similar objection appears in the context of debates about whether Black Americans are obligated to integrate neighborhoods so as to realize requirements of justice. Tommie Shelby argues that such requirements effectively impose additional burdens on individuals precisely because those individuals have already been subject to injustice. See Shelby 2014 , 281‐283.

See Faden 2020 ; Lopez, Raine, and Bundiman 2020 ; Parker, Horowitz, and Brown 2020 ; and Solomon and Hamilton 2020 .

An anonymous reviewer suggests that income qualifications for the CARES Act may also suggest that it is more of a stimulus, since lower income people have a higher marginal propensity to consume (rather than save) their income. While this is true (cf. Carroll, et al., 2017 ), at least in the US, the poorest members of the population on government assistance are less likely to have tax returns on file to avoid a delay in receiving a check. Of the approximately 12 million Americans who qualified for a check but did not receive one under the CARES Act, 9 million were recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) or Medicaid (Marr, et al., 2020 ).

In any case, a single piece of legislation may have multiple aims. We think that an important aim of the CARES Act—the full title of which is the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act—is to provide economic assistance to those burdened by the pandemic, which is sometimes lost by referring to the bill as an economic stimulus.

See Raz 1986 , 46‐57.

Our claim is not that everyone has direct, first‐personal access to their own preferences and expectations to know whether or not they experience a burden. While people sometimes mistakenly overestimate the degree to which they are burdened by social distancing, normally they are responsible for forming well‐founded beliefs about their own condition relative to others. Someone who is not greatly burdened should not overestimate the importance of minor setbacks they experience, and so should donate government assistance they receive. Failure to do so would, at least in many cases, be a failure to discharge their duty of reciprocity because of culpable ignorance.

Some individuals who are unfairly burdened may falsely believe that they are not if they tend to compare their condition to those who are even more unfairly burdened in their communities. We suspect that such cases are rare, because of the normal tendency not to underestimate the degree to one is burdened by social policy relative to others. In any case, such individuals would not be obligated to donate to help others worse off than they are, though it would be supererogatory for them to do so. Because of the epistemic difficulties in assessing whether others are burdened by the pandemic, we are not suggesting that people attempt to elicit shame or guilt on the part of those who fail to donate but appear not to be burdened, since it is difficult to assess the degree to which others are burdened by the social response to the pandemic.

Additionally, while some people are not presently burdened, they may be burdened in the future (e.g., through job losses). Our position is that the reasonable expectation of diminished prospects as a result of social distancing is a kind of anticipatable burden, and may be a reason that justifies not giving now. Since we believe that people are normally prone to overestimate the extent to which they are burdened or threatened with future burdens, however, we think that individuals should generally err on the side of helping others in need now rather than on focusing on the risk of future burdens to themselves. If one’s expectations of future burdens, even if reasonable, are not realized, one should work to help others who have in fact been unfairly burdened.

It is important to clarify that we are not claiming that individual donations do a better job than state assistance in helping us discharge our obligations of reciprocity toward one another. Individual contributions, for example, are less able to help solve the assurance problem. Obligations of reciprocity are obligations that we ultimately owe to each other, and that the state helps us solve through helping us coordinate with one another and to solve the assurance problem. The apparent trade‐off between the fine‐grain information that individuals possess about their own preferences and situation and the state’s ability to apply coercive power to solve the assurance problem is illusory: both approaches have an important role to play in cases in which the state lacks fine‐grained information about where relief is most needed.

Some of the challenges for businesses and policymakers in predicting how the post‐COVID recovery will go are outlined by Barrero and Bloom 2020 . Pohlman and Reynolds 2020 give additional reasons why economic forecasting during a pandemic is particularly challenging for governments and businesses.

For example, economic theory once predicted that increasing the minimum wage would have negative distributive consequences for some, since it would increase unemployment in low‐wage occupations, but decades of empirical research suggests that this is not the case. For an overview of this literature, see Card and Krueger 2015 . While the effects of economic policies on distributive justice can be surprising, the epistemic problems they raise are empirically tractable, as evidenced by the now mostly‐settled debate about the distributive effects of minimum wage policy.

For a similar view on the priority of obligations of reciprocity to conationals over considerations of global justice, see Sangiovanni 2007 .

Indeed, people around the world did support Wuhan in the early days of the pandemic. See Direct Relief 2020 .

• Albrecht, Leslie . 2020. “Meet the People Who are Donating Their $1,200 Stimulus Checks to Charity: ‘It’s Not Really My Money, It’s Our Money’.” Marketwatch , April 17, 2020. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/meet‐the‐people‐who‐are‐giving‐away‐their‐1200‐stimulus‐checks‐its‐not‐really‐my‐money‐its‐our‐money‐2020‐04‐17 . [ Google Scholar ]
• Allen, Terrina . 2020. “$200 Billion in Hazard Pay: These Workers Must Get Their Fair Share.” Forbes, May 13, 2020. https://www.forbes.com/sites/terinaallen/2020/05/13/200‐billion‐in‐hazard‐pay‐these‐essential‐workers‐must‐get‐their‐fair‐share/#4fb2ef9b26b6 . [ Google Scholar ]
• Barrero, Jose Maria , and Bloom Nick. 2020. “Economic Uncertainty and the Recovery.” Working Paper. Jackson Hole Economic Symposium, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. https://nbloom.people.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj4746/f/jh_final.pdf .
• Beitz, Charles R . 1999. Political Theory and International Relations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Begley, Sharon . 2020. “To Grasp Who’s Dying of COVID‐19, Look to Social Factors Like Race More than Preexisting Diseases.” Statnews, June 15, 2020. https://www.statnews.com/2020/06/15/whos‐dying‐of‐covid19‐look‐to‐social‐factors‐like‐race/comment‐page‐3/ . [ Google Scholar ]
• Bernstein, Justin , Hutler Brian, Rieder Travis N., Faden Ruth, Han Hahrie, and Barnhill Anne. 2020. An Ethics Framework for the COVID‐19 Reopening Process. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics. https://bioethics.jhu.edu/research‐and‐outreach/covid‐19‐bioethics‐expert‐insights/resources‐for‐addressing‐key‐ethical‐areas/grappling‐with‐the‐ethics‐of‐social‐distancing/ . [ Google Scholar ]
• Binder, Sherri Brokopp , Baker Charlene K., and Barile John P.. 2015. “Rebuild or Relocate? Resilience and Postdisaster Decision‐Making After Hurricane Sandy.” American Journal of Community Psychology 56: 180–96. 10.1007/s10464-015-9727-x. [ DOI ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Blake, Michael . 2001. “Distributive Justice, State Coercion, and Autonomy.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 30(3): 257–96. 10.1111/j.1088-4963.2001.00257.x. [ DOI ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Braveman, Paula A. , Cubbin Catherine, Egerter Susan, Williams David R., and Pamuk Elsie. 2010. “Socioeconomic Disparities in Health in the United States: What the Patterns Tell Us.” American Journal of Public Health 100(S1): 186–96. 10.2105/AJPH.2009.166082. [ DOI ] [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Card, David , and Krueger Alan B.. 2015. Myth and Measurement: The New Economics of the Minimum Wage. 20th anniversary ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Carroll, Christopher , Slacalek Jiri, Tukuoka Kiichi, and White Matthew N.. 2017. “The Distribution of Wealth and the Marginal Propensity to Consume.” Quantitative Economics 8: 977–1020. 10.3982/QE694. [ DOI ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Cato, Susumu , Iida Takashi, Ishida Kenji, Ito Asei, McElwain Kenneth Mori, and Shoji Masashiro. 2020. “Social Distancing as a Public Good Under the COVID‐19 Pandemic.” Public Health. 10.1016/j.puhe.2020.08.005. [ DOI ] [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Center for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC] . 2020. “Weekly Updates by Select Demographic and Geographic Characteristics. Provisional Death Counts for Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID‐19).” Accessed September 21, 2020. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm .
• Daniels, Norman . 2008. Just Health: Meeting Health Needs Fairly. New York: Cambridge University Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Direct Relief . 2020. “U. S. Private Sector Backing China’s Coronavirus Fight.” February 6, 2020. https://www.directrelief.org/2020/02/protective‐gear‐bound‐for‐cities‐in‐china‐with‐most‐coronavirus‐patients/ .
• Doyle, Orla . 2020. COVID‐19: Exacerbating Educational Inequalities? Dublin: Public Policy.IE. http://publicpolicy.ie/papers/covid‐19‐exacerbating‐educational‐inequalities/ . [ Google Scholar ]
• Enda, Grace , Gale William G., and Haldeman Claire. 2020. “Careful or Careless? Perspectives on the CARES Act.” The Brookings Institute, March 27, 2020. https://www..edu/blog/up‐front/2020/03/27/careful‐or‐careless‐perspectives‐on‐the‐cares‐act/ .
• Faden, Ruth . 2020. “What’s at Stake When Schools Close for the Coronavirus? A Bioethicist Weighs In.” Education Week, March 3, 2020. https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2020/03/06/whats‐a‐stake‐when‐schools‐close‐for.html . [ Google Scholar ]
• Feinberg, Joel . 1978. “Voluntary Euthanasia and the Inalienable Right to Life.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 7(2): 93–123. [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Ford, Tiffany , Reber Sarah, and Reeves Richard V.. 2020. “Race Gaps in COVID‐19 Deaths Are Even Bigger than They Appear.” The Brookings Institute, June 6, 2020. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up‐front/2020/06/16/race‐gaps‐in‐covid‐19‐deaths‐are‐even‐bigger‐than‐they‐appear/ .
• Hawkins, Devan . 2020. “The Coronavirus Burden is Falling Heavily on Black Americans. Why?” The Guardian, April 16, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/16/black‐workers‐coronavirus‐covid‐19 . [ Google Scholar ]
• Hayek, F. A . 1945. “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” American Economic Review 34(4): 519–30. [ Google Scholar ]
• Hsiang, Solomon , Allen Daniel, Annan‐Phan Sébastien, Bell Kendon, Bolliger Ian, Chong Trinetta, Druckenmiller Hannah, Huang Luna Yue, Hultgren Andrew, Krasovich Emma, Lau Peiley, Lee Jaecheol, Rolf Esther, Tseng Jeannette, and Tiffany Wu. 2020. “The Effect of Large‐Scale Anti‐Contagion Policies on the COVID‐19 Pandemic.” Nature 584: 262–267. 10.1038/s41586-020-2404-8. [ DOI ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Kingma, Bruce R . 1997. “Public Goods Theories of the Non‐Profit Sector: Weisbrod Revisited.” VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations 8: 135–48. [ Google Scholar ]
• Klosko, George . 1987. “Presumptive Benefit, Fairness, and Political Obligation.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 16(3): 241–259. [ Google Scholar ]
• Klosko, George . 2004. The Principle of Fairness and Political Obligation. Landham: Rowan & Littlefield. [ Google Scholar ]
• Knittel, Christopher R. , and Ozaltun Bora. 2020. “What Does and Does Not Correlate with COVID‐19 Death Rates.” Working paper. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/ 10.1101/2020.06.09.20126805v1. [ DOI ]
• Kofler, Natalie , and Baylis Françoise. 2020. “Ten Reasons Why Immunity Passports are a Bad Idea.” Nature, May 21, 2020. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586‐020‐01451‐0?fbclid=IwAR1X5duOdn5alKTxONXhIt1wlWhsuQ7TqTdczPpNoCZisMi_EHEfaDCceRM . [ DOI ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Lopez, Mark Hugo , Rainie Lee, and Budiman Abby. 2020. “Financial and Health Impacts of COVID‐19 Vary Widely by Race and Ethnicity.” Pew Research Center, May 5, 2020. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact‐tank/2020/05/05/financial‐and‐health‐impacts‐of‐covid‐19‐vary‐widely‐by‐race‐and‐ethnicity/ .
• Maragakis, Lisa Lockerd . 2020. “Coronavirus, Social and Physical Distancing and Self‐Quarantine.” Johns Hopkins Medicine Blog, May 13, 2020. https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions‐and‐diseases/coronavirus/coronavirus‐social‐distancing‐and‐self‐quarantine . [ Google Scholar ]
• Marr, Chuck , Cox Kris, Bryant Kathleen, Dean Stacy, Caines Roxy, and Sherman Arloc. 2020. “Aggressive State Outreach Can Help Reach the 12 Million Non‐Filers Eligible for Stimulus Payments.” Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. Last modified October 14, 2020. https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal‐tax/aggressive‐state‐outreach‐can‐help‐reach‐the‐12‐million‐non‐filers‐eligible‐for .
• Milstone, Aaron . 2020. “Coronavirus in Babies and Kids: Symptoms and Prevention.” John Hopkins Medicine Blog. Accessed September 21, 2020. https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions‐and‐diseases/coronavirus/coronavirus‐in‐babies‐and‐children . [ Google Scholar ]
• Moller, Dan . 2018. Governing the Least: A New England Libertarianism. Oxford University Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Nevins, Jake . 2020. “The Imperative of Personal Sacrifice, Today and During World War II.” New York Times Magazine, April 3, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/03/magazine/personal‐sacrifice‐coronavirus‐world‐war‐ii.html . [ Google Scholar ]
• The New York Times . 2020. “50 Million Kids Can’t Attend School. What Happens to Them?” April 16, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/16/opinion/coronavirus‐schools‐closed.html?referringSource=articleShare .
• Nozick, Robert . 1974. Anarchy, State, & Utopia. New York: Basic Books. [ Google Scholar ]
• Ostrom, Vincent , and Ostrom Elinor. 2015. “Public Goods and Public Choices.” In Elinor Ostrom and the Bloomington School of Political Economy Vol. 2: Resource Governance, edited by Cole Daniel H. and McGinnis Michael D.. Lanham, MA: Rowman & Littlefield. [ Google Scholar ]
• Owen, William F. , Carmona Richard, and Pomeroy Claire. 2020. “Failing Another National Stress Test on Health Disparities.” Journal of American Medical Association. April 15, 2020. 10.1001/jama.2020.6547. [ DOI ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Parker, Kim , Horowitz Juliana Menasce, and Brown Anna. 2020. “About Half of Lower‐Income Americans Report Household Job or Wage Loss Due to COVID‐19.” Pew Research Center. April 21, 2020. https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2020/04/21/about‐half‐of‐lower‐income‐americans‐report‐household‐job‐or‐wage‐loss‐due‐to‐covid‐19/ .
• Parra, Aritz . 2020. “Doctors in Hard‐Hit Madrid: ‘It’s Like March in Slow Motion’.” Washington Post, September 16, 2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/madrid‐europes‐pandemic‐hotspot‐mulls‐targeted‐lockdowns/2020/09/16/a07477f2‐f800‐11ea‐85f7‐5941188a98cd_story.html . [ Google Scholar ]
• Pohlman, Arne , and Reynolds Oliver. 2020. “Why Economic Forecasting is So Difficult in the Pandemic.” Harvard Business Review. May 18, 2020. https://hbr.org/2020/05/why‐economic‐forecasting‐is‐so‐difficult‐in‐the‐pandemic .
• Pogge, Thomas W . 1994. “An Egalitarian Law of Peoples.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 23(3): 195–224. [ Google Scholar ]
• Rawls, John . 1999a. The Law of Peoples. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Rawls, John . 1999b. “Legal Obligation and the Duty of Fair Play.” In Collected Papers, edited by Freeman Samuel, 117–29. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Rawls, John . 1999c. A Theory of Justice. Revised edition. Harvard: Harvard University Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Raz, Joseph . 1986. The Morality of Freedom. New York: Oxford University Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Robeyns, Ingrid . 2016. “The Capability Approach.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Zalta Edward N.. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/capability‐approach/ . [ Google Scholar ]
• Sahm, Claudia R . 2019. “Direct Stimulus Payments to Individuals.” In Recession Ready: Fiscal Policies to Stabilize the American Economy, edited by Boushey Heather, Nunn Ryan, and Shambaugh Jay, 67–92. Washington, DC: Brookings Institute. [ Google Scholar ]
• Sahm, Claudia R. , Shapiro Matthew D., and Slemrod Joel. 2012. “Check in the Mail or More in the Paycheck: Does the Effectiveness of Fiscal Stimulus Depend on How It is Delivered?” American Journal of Economic Policy 4(3): 216–50. 10.1257/pol.4.3.216. [ DOI ] [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Sangiovanni, Andrea . 2007. “Global Justice, Reciprocity, and the State.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 35(1): 3–39. [ Google Scholar ]
• Serwer, Adam . 2020. “The Coronavirus Was an Emergency until Trump Found Out Who Was Dying.” The Atlantic, May 8, 2020. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/americas‐racial‐contract‐showing/611389/ . [ Google Scholar ]
• Shelby, Tommie . 2014. “Integration, Inequality, and Imperatives of Justice: A Review Essay.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 42(3): 253–85. 10.2307/26605211. [ DOI ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Shonkoff, Jack , and Williams David R.. 2020. “Thinking about Racial Disparities in COVID‐19 Impacts Through a Science‐Informed, Early Childhood Lens.” Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. April 27, 2020. https://developingchild.harvard.edu/thinking‐about‐racial‐disparities‐in‐covid‐19‐impacts‐through‐a‐science‐informed‐early‐childhood‐lens/ .
• Singer, Peter . 1974. “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 1(3): 229–43. [ Google Scholar ]
• Solomon, Danielle , and Hamilton Darrick. 2020. “The Coronavirus Pandemic and the Racial Wealth Gap.” Center for American Progress and the Kirwan Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. March 19, 2020. https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/news/2020/03/19/481962/coronavirus‐pandemic‐racial‐wealth‐gap/ .
• Stewart, Emily . 2020. “Essential Workers are Taking Care of America. Are We Taking Care of Them?” Vox, April 23, 2020. https://www.vox.com/covid‐19‐coronavirus‐explainers/2020/4/23/21228971/essential‐workers‐stories‐coronavirus‐hazard‐pay‐stimulus‐covid‐19 . [ Google Scholar ]
• Tan, Kok‐Chor . 2004. Justice Without Borders: Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and Patriotism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Unger, Peter . 1996. Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence. New York: Oxford University Press. [ Google Scholar ]
• Van Lancker, Wim , and Parolin Zachary. 2020. “COVID‐19, school closures, and child poverty: a social crisis in the making.” The Lancet Public Health 5(5): e243–e244. 10.1016/S2468-2667(20)30084-0 [ DOI ] [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Virginia Department of Health . 2020. “Coronavirus: Prevention Tips.” Accessed May 13, 2020. https://www.vdh.virginia.gov/coronavirus/prevention‐tips/ .
• Wadhera, Rishi K , Wadhera Priya, and Gaba Prakriti. 2020. “Variation in COVID‐19 Hospitalizations and Deaths Across New York City Boroughs.” Journal of the American Medical Association. April 29, 2020. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article‐abstract/2765524 . [ DOI ] [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ]
• Walker, Andrew . 2020. “Developing World Economies Hit Hard by Coronavirus.” BBC. April 23, 2020. https://www.bbc.com/news/business‐52352395 . [ Google Scholar ]
• WBIR . 2020. “Garth Brooks, Trisha Yearwood Featured in New ‘Do Your Part, Stay Apart’ Campaign Video.” April 23, 2020. https://www.wbir.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/garth‐brooks‐and‐trisha‐yearwood‐featured‐in‐new‐do‐your‐part‐stay‐apart‐campaign‐video/51‐97d8a029‐1f39‐4514‐8b11‐d60b5cf7be61 .
• World Bank . 2018. “Poverty Headcount Ratio at $1.90 a Day (2011 PPP) (% of Population).” Accessed October 8, 2020. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.DDAY?view=map .
• Yaffe‐Bellany, David . 2020. “‘The Big Guys Get Bailed Out’: Restaurants Vie for Relief Funds.” New York Times, April 20, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/20/business/shake‐shack‐returning‐loan‐ppp‐coronavirus.html . [ Google Scholar ]
• View on publisher site
• PDF (559.1 KB)
• Collections

Similar articles

Cited by other articles, links to ncbi databases.

• Download .nbib .nbib
• Format: AMA APA MLA NLM

Add to Collections

What ‘relief’ for the poor should really look like

Aid handouts for poor communities allow them to just barely survive. This has to change.

A typical relief pack in the Philippines consists of a few kilos of rice, canned sardines, instant noodles, sachets of instant coffee, and a pack of sugar. Colloquially known as “relief goods”, food packs are distributed to poor and low-income households in times of disaster. They serve as immediate aid, a stop-gap measure; but for the poor, they are a lifeline until “normalcy” – a return to familiar rhythms of precarity – is restored. 

Since President Rodrigo Duterte placed Metro Manila under “ community quarantine ” on March 12, and expanded this measure four days later to encompass the island group of Luzon, millions of relief packs have been distributed by state agencies, local governments, companies, non-government organisations, and individuals.

Yet their contents do not vary substantially; and the fact that they do not is telling of how both government and citizens value the needs of the poor and understand what is essential to survival. 

Relief goods do not give relief, but rather offer the barest minimum of subsistence. Even then, what the state and private donors deem rudimentary is deficient, because hardly any thoughtful consideration is given to recipients’ needs. For instance, a typical relief pack does not allow families to cook, let alone prepare nutritious meals since basic pantry items and fresh produce are not included. Sacks of rice and bags of vegetables are more the exception than the rule.

Instead of asking what people need, we assume that we already know. Such mindless generosity conveys that the disaster-stricken should subsist on meagre allocations. Relief packs distributed to the hardest-hit and the worst-off are a metaphor for classed understandings and attributions of human dignity. They illuminate prevailing practices of care and explain the inadequacy and indignity of state responses to crises that trap the poor in cycles of deeper poverty and precarity.

Mismanaging a pandemic

After months of downplaying the coronavirus outbreak, Duterte eventually imposed a lockdown of Metro Manila, quickly deploying police and military to enforce immediate compliance. This militarised response proceeds from the government’s view of the pandemic as a national security issue rather than a public health emergency. It reinforces the administration’s law-and-order approach to governance and the president’s obsession with framing every crisis situation as a “war”.

In the span of two weeks, a state of calamity was declared and presidential emergency powers were granted to authorise the realignment of funds for governing a crisis that was fast becoming a catastrophe. While this has adversely affected the entire population, the lockdown has without a doubt disproportionately aggravated poor and low-income people.  

Livelihood, mobility, housing, nutrition, sanitation, and healthcare have become especially precarious for socially vulnerable groups. As work was suspended, casual and contractual jobs were lost to termination or subjected to flexible work arrangements with reduced pay.

Daily wage earners under a “no work, no pay” scheme, and underpaid essential workers were left to walk long distances or made to endure perilous commutes on board crowded trucks , as mobility was severely crippled by the public transport shutdown, ban on domestic travel, and proliferation of checkpoints.

One migrant worker, for example, walked some 400km in five days , journeying from Muntinlupa, a city in Metro Manila, to his hometown in Camarines Sur, a province in southern Luzon. 

Amid exhortations to self-isolate at home and observe physical distancing, stranded workers were admonished by government officials to find temporary accommodation to house them for the duration of the quarantine. Informal settlers and the homeless found themselves not only at a greater risk of contracting the virus but also in violation of strict directives by dint of their dense living conditions. Violators were punished , beaten up , arrested , ordered shot , or killed outright .

Without income and savings, or the freedom to ply a trade and find ways to put food on the table, people were made to depend on unreliable rations of insufficient relief goods. Until the lockdown, access to food has never been so insecure and prohibitive, and demanding food aid has never been so dangerous . In the absence of adequate water and sanitation infrastructure in urban poor settlements, appeals for frequent handwashing rang hollow. Pumps of hand sanitiser in village checkpoints replaced communal wash stations vital to practising good hygiene. 

Starving and barely able to survive, the poor have struggled to keep themselves safe and healthy. As hospitals scrambled to manage the chaos from an overload of patients and severe shortage in essential equipment and personnel, the poor’s already diminished access to healthcare dwindled further.

In Manila, no other social group has been as terribly disadvantaged by the pandemic and the state’s botched responses to it than the urban underclass.

Reproducing urban inequalities

Locking down Metro Manila has aggravated and reproduced urban inequalities. National and local governments have failed to translate critical but untenable recommendations of home quarantine and physical distancing into viable action plans that understand informal settlements first, as built into the urban fabric, and then as vectors of transmission, and so require prioritising their inhabitants as an at-risk population rather than disciplining them.

This colossal mistake underlies a failure to recognise that extraordinary emergencies exceptionally hurt socially vulnerable groups and so urgently demand extraordinary responses centred on social justice.

But while these failures point to incompetence in governance, the finer point is that they radically expose deep flaws embedded in social structures. Reckless and inept responses to exceptional circumstances reveal fundamental gaps in the way our institutions and systems are organised and actually function, which in normal times already fail spectacularly to address social needs.

It is this very impotence and deficiency that mobilise and necessitate civic action. Yet, collective efforts will remain insufficient and unsustainable not only because resources and capacities are limited, but also because citizen interventions are meant to supplement rather than fill the gaps and repair the failures of government.

Unreflexive, unempathetic, and exclusionary practices of care

Nonetheless, the inadequacy of cultures of provisioning, whether public or private, owes more to deficits in practices of care. The way we exercise care as a society is unreflexive, unempathetic, and exclusionary. 

It is unreflexive because it defaults to templates of giving which proceed from unexamined assumptions of what the poor need. It is unempathetic because it displays a lack of curiosity about and conveys disinterest in understanding their needs. It is exclusionary because it discriminates with requirements, qualifications, and conditionalities. 

That we think in terms of what the poor need to survive rather than what they need to live, indicates a concern for mere survival rather than life. This preoccupation with getting by rather than what French philosopher Michel Foucault terms “making live” suggests an impoverished political imagination that can only hope for the poor to survive rather than thrive.

Narrow ideas of what people deserve materialise in the quality of help that is extended: in the selection of items included in the bags of aid that are distributed, in the amount of cash assistance that is allocated, or in the quality of accommodation provided. Regardless of intention, efforts therefore remain unresponsive to what people truly need, and as such fail to give relief. 

A radical reimagination of care

Impoverished practices of care are rooted in embedded classed understandings and differential attributions of human dignity. They originate in the undignified view of the poor as people who matter less and therefore deserve less.

This idea informs beliefs that their needs are rudimentary, that substandard state welfare is acceptable, that shoddy generosity is unobjectionable, and that a life of deprivation excuses mediocre provisioning. The mentality that beggars cannot be choosers undergirds and characterises how Filipinos practise care as a society. 

Correcting this requires a critical examination of how we regard and relate to the poor. A radical change in perspective encourages the development of a political imagination animated by the flourishing of life.

It is a quality of mind that militates against mere survival, questions celebrations of resilience , and transgresses what is permissible and desirable.

It demands more than what we are accustomed to giving and receiving. It requires distributing relief packs teeming with pantry staples, nutritious food items, fresh produce, toiletries, as well as health and hygiene essentials. It entails repurposing hotels to shelter and sustain shack dwellers and the homeless; guaranteeing hazard pay to uncounted essential workers ; and providing direct and adequate financial assistance to poor and low-income households.

A political imagination insists on the radical. More than enacting unprecedented emergency measures, it demands a people-centred restructuring of healthcare, housing, and social protection systems to disrupt conditions that produce and reproduce urban marginality.

The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.  

Published daily by the Lowy Institute

Philippines community pantries give help – and send a message

Filipinos are putting the Duterte administration on notice that its efforts to help during the pandemic fall short.

• Philippines
• Coronavirus

A handwritten slogan can be spotted on cardboard posters at stalls across the Philippines: “Give according to your means, take according to your need.” These are makeshift community pantries, ad hoc efforts that provide free items such as rice, vegetables, canned goods and even facemasks that benefit millions of Filipinos. And while there are food banks in countries across the world, the community pantry in the Philippines has come to represent so much more. It is not only an expression of compassion for the poor, but a political statement against the state – a symbol of national solidarity in a country struggling to survive the pandemic.

Fishermen give away their catch while farmers donate baskets of their produce.

The double economic burden of job losses and rising prices of commodities has afflicted the Philippines, which has yet to recover from one of the world’s longest and strictest Covid-19 lockdowns. Goods from community pantries can therefore mean the difference between life and death for many Filipinos. Most contributions flow from the rich and the middle class. But people who are struggling financially are also donating what little cash or groceries they can share. Some even come from rural areas to give – fishermen give away their catch while farmers donate baskets of their produce.

Community pantries not only exhibit generosity, they also demonstrate respect and consideration for others. Most of those who line up for hours take just enough for themselves and their families, mindful that others behind them are also in need. There is no sign of the type of hoarding that was evident in supermarkets across the world at the onset of the pandemic. Instead, the system is built on what Filipino sociologist Randy David describes as “faceless giving and discreet receiving”. The community pantry, David says, “offers no space for the self-promotion and obligatory acknowledgments that usually accompany the mass distribution of emergency assistance”.

But this is more than a noble instrument to help others. The community pantry also sends a political message of public frustration about government ineptitude in providing for the nation. The Philippine government provided only up to PHP 8,000 (A$215) in 2020 and a maximum of PHP 4,000 ($107) this year for each of the country’s 18 million low-income families, not enough to buy their daily essentials. Ana Patricia Non, the 26-year old lady who first started a pantry in her neighborhood that inspired replicas nationwide, explained the reason behind her initiative: “I’m tired of complaining. I’m tired of inaction,” she said. “The fact that this has gone viral, it means this is a gut issue.” As it inadvertently exposed institutional shortcomings, the boom in community pantries should therefore serve as a wake-up call for the government to do more for its people.

The community pantries in the Philippines can also be seen as a political statement repudiating government malice towards charity and volunteerism. A few days after Non’s community pantry spread far and wide, the national police openly linked it to the communist movement and accused it of being a vehicle to recruit members. In keeping with President Rodrigo Duterte’s resolve to quell the long-running communist insurgency in the country, those “ red tagged ” as communists by the police often end up dead. Fearing for her life and the lives of other volunteers, Non was forced to close her community pantry after police officers visited her and started asking questions. It took assurances from the city mayor and the head of the country’s Department of the Interior and Local Government for her to reopen.

The temporary closure of Non’s pantry prompted public outrage, which unexpectedly resulted in more food and cash donations, which she used to support other community pantries. Its growing support tacitly indicates the Filipino public’s pushback against the Duterte administration’s unwarranted intimidation.

Because of limited government assistance, community pantries symbolise national unity born out of necessity – of weary folks finding solace in helping others. From just one community pantry in Metro Manila, by the end of April there were 358 community pantries scattered across the Philippines. Such initiatives are essentially a stopgap measure to help more people survive the socio-economic crisis plaguing the country. The community pantries essentially target these Filipino families who have gotten used to not knowing when their next meal will be. As Non puts it : “If the items in the community pantry ran out, that is a good problem. The goal is for the food to be consumed, not to be displayed.”

But as with other charities, these community pantries may eventually suffer from fatigue and slowly fizzle out, as their sustainability and longevity are not guaranteed . Yet community pantries in the Philippines demonstrate a revolutionary expression of human compassion, political activism and national solidarity that will continue to bring out the best of Filipinos during the worst of times. Philippine Senator Francis Pangilinan regards such initiative as a form of people power against hunger: “It warms the heart. It fills the tummy. I believe that there's no greater power than a united, empathetic action altogether toward one goal.”

Related Content

A step-change to Beijing's "lawfare" in the South China Sea

You may also be interested in, pacific links: australia’s budget, shortwave services, the pacific test, and more, a reckoning for thailand’s indigenous defence industry, myanmar and a new kind of civil war.