The crux of the issue is that there is a cutoff point somewhere, where lives saved outstrips the burden to the individual, but we cannot agree on a cutoff point

The crux of the issue is that there is a cutoff point somewhere, where lives saved outstrips the burden to the individual, but we cannot agree on a cutoff point because it involves a variety of subjective value judgements. We probably agree that there are cases where the value of individual freedom is more important than the lives saved (e.g. most people would be against banning sugar in soda pop), and that there are cases where lives saved is more important than individual freedoms (e.g. most people would be in favor of banning cyanide in soda pop). Then there are cases where there is a pretty healthy debate, e.g. "should sarsaparilla be banned in soda pop?" Sarsaparilla, the traditional flavor of root beer, contains safrole, which has been shown to be highly carcinogenic in mice, which is why the FDA recently banned it. But if you ask the people who are against the ban, they might give you a variety of reasons you don't expect, which is a good exercise because there are some decent analogues to the anti-mask argument, even if it's not a perfect analogy obviously: * the evidence that it's harmful is humans is somewhat debatable (anti-mask-mandate people might argue about the quality of the evidence that wearing masks reduces deaths) * other foods like nutmeg contain safrole but aren't banned (anti-mask-mandate people might argue that restrictions are arbitrary and thus may have an ulterior motive) * sarsaparilla has a quality that some people prefer to the non-toxic alternatives for subjective reasons such as the taste (anti-mask-mandate people might say that they subjectively prefer not wearing masks, e.g. because they find them uncomfortable or inconvenient) * sarsaparilla farmers may be impacted particularly heavily even if most people are not (anti-mask-mandate people might suggest that while most people, even themselves, are not heavily burdened by wearing masks, it might more seriously burden a smaller minority of people [1]) * people with certain moral/ethical/religious/political beliefs might be fundamentally against the idea of a government forcing such a ban on the population, or even the government having the authority in the first place to impose such a ban, even if they agreed with the rationale and personally stopped drinking sarsaparilla soda (the anti-mask-mandate argument is roughly identical of course) Hopefully the analogy isn't too out-there. I'm still ambivalent personally on mask mandates myself to be clear, for a combination of some of the arguments above. [1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7417296/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7417296/