Will COVID-19 reduce our empathy gap?

The just-world phenomenon is the tendency for people to believe that the world is fair, and that people get what they deserve. This can lead to victim blaming and a glossing over of inequality and injustice.

The just-world phenomenon is upheld in the logic of healthism, a neoliberal understanding of health as personal responsibility. In the logic of healthism, the pursuit of health is socially and psychologically appropriate; health becomes a site of identity formation, which also links health with wider notions of citizenship and morality.

In creating a moral dimension to healthy living, healthism legitimises judgement of the self and others according to how much one follows healthy living guidelines, resulting in affective responses that can include satisfaction, shame, or guilt. Positioning people as responsible for health implies responsibility for ill-health too, intensifying the logic of blame in the just world phenomenon.

COVID-19 exposes the fallacy of the just world phenomenon in relation to health. Our essential workers - nurses, health care workers, carers, hospital security and porters, supermarket shelf-stackers, bus drivers, fruit and veg pickers – are often on lower salaries. Meanwhile, their work makes them more vulnerable to becoming infected as they go about supporting the rest of us. In this context, we ask: can COVID-19 reduce our 'buy in' to healthism so we can collectively resist the blame game that justifies inequalities?

Can we use the COVID-19 response to create a cultural moment that resists the neoliberal logic that produces, as Stainton Rogers polemically argues, a "blame the victim culture, where the poor, the obese, the dispossessed and the pathetic losers, the homeless and the stateless are held responsible for their misfortunes, shifting responsibility away from those who otherwise might be held to account" (2011: 77)?