Corporate Mask Policies

In response to COVID-19, many businesses have imposed new policies that require all people over a fairly young age without exempting medical complications to wear masks to help lower the probability of somehow giving others the virus.  The controversy of this has been enormous, with liberals tending to make positive assumptions about the usefulness of masks in preventing the spread of the virus (all assumptions are irrational because they are not knowledge) and conservatives tending to view mask mandates as tyrannical.  Liberal emotionalism is quick to surface in a crisis, but conservative hypocrisy contradicts the internal claims that conservatism is more rational than liberalism (neither ultimately is rational).

It is not true that it is logically or morally valid for a business to refuse consumers on any basis whatsoever--telling a customer to leave the premises because they are a man, woman, white, or black is irrational and unjust, for instance.  Beyond matters like this, however, a business has not necessarily done anything irrational or immoral by refusing service to people who, say, will not wear masks despite having no medical issues that would exempt them from needing to wear a mask anyway.  There is no grounds for complaining about a mask requirement policy as long as medical exceptions are allowed and the reasons for the policy are not because of any fallacious beliefs about masks or disease.

For companies managed by rational leaders, encouraging or requiring that customers wear masks is not about thinking that a virus can be utterly, completely kept at bay by any safety precautions, nor is it about believing that science is about appeals to authority from subjectively respected scientists.  It is about nothing more than protecting vulnerable people from COVID-19 and pragmatically discouraging panic.  Conspiracy theories and the mere assumptions that are part of conservatism are what drive the conservative pushback against policies that prioritize masks.

The hypocrisy of conservatives can be seen by contrasting their response to mask policies with how they treat private businesses.  Conservatives are notorious for having very authoritarian attitudes towards how children should interact with their parents, holding that children should obey their parents almost universally while living in the same house even though this is an asinine, contradictory stance to hold [1].  They are also generally strong proponents of corporate autonomy from the government and of allowing businesses to regulate themselves.  Ironically, they then object loudly when businesses refuse clients on amoral grounds, all while saying that their children should obey their parents regardless of what they are told to do.  They hold to distinct double standards of authoritarianism when enforcing their own arbitrary preferences that lack objective authority all while demanding that a business not require mask use during a pandemic!

The hypocrisy of the conservative reaction to authority figures flares up as soon as different authority figures are mentioned!  Selective authoritarianism (or authoritarianism of any kind) is a guise of stupidity, not of rationality.  Conservatives use appeals to authority to support submission to arbitrarily specific leaders and then disregard their own arguments in other contexts.  When reason and justice are the only things that motivate people to submit to a given authority figure, however, authority figures of any kind--in the family, business world, government, or education system--are recognized as having no epistemological or moral authority if they do not align themselves with the truth.


[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2020/02/legalistic-parenting.html