> Further... Everyone else at the mall can also choose to not take that risk, though it's not really true for students in high school.

There's that fallacy again. It won't die. It's not just the people in the mall. It's everyone THEY will infect, and the next generation of infections, and the next.

A pandemic like this (contra HIV, which is very uninfectious and is transmitted almost exclusively by consensual 1:1 activities) just plain isn't susceptible to moral reasoning at the level of individual actions. There is NO feasible way an individual can make an informed choice to "accept" risk of covid infection that doesn't also increase (significantly!) the risk borne by the rest of society.

You can't do it. Any moral statement of the form "this infection risk is OK because I/he/she/they are OK with it" is just wrong, logically.

I think our disagreement here comes from a difference in axioms or moral systems, not arguments or data.

It does indeed, but (no, as it were, offense) yours doesn't work logically, at least not with the words you're choosing.

You can't wave away all the mall-goers risk-taking with "they chose it", because you're not including all their siblings and roommates and parents who they'll necessarily infect who did NOT choose that. You need to come up with another definition for "choice" than the one we conventionally understand.

Again, you're using language of individual risk. That doesn't work here.

I think you need to take a look at some other ethical systems. There's a famous example of Kant saying it's immoral to lie to prevent your friend from being murdered - that the consequences of the act have no bearing on whether the act is moral or not. The parallels here should be at least somewhat apparent. This isn't my code, but it's not exactly unheard of. (And a ton of people would argue that Kantian ethics are fucking stupid. In the end, all ethical systems lead to absurdity at the edges)

For the mall example... That other person, who chose to come there and be exposed? The one with roommates, and a grandmother living next door? It's not me - living alone, in this scenario - who chooses to expose them. It's the one who lives with them, if anyone. You're taking their responsibility and piling it on to me - but there's a lot of links in the causal chain before the harm comes to pass, and some of those links bear far more responsibility. It's like blaming the guy who goes to the bar after a long day for the actions of another guy who goes to the same bar and kills a family drunk driving home, because by being there he contributed to an atmosphere of heavy drinking.

The language of individual risk and responsibility isn't quite so limited in my mind as it is in yours.