Paul Faulkner's (2021) discussion of the Covid lockdown in Britain and of the effect of the apparent breach of the lockdown rules by a senior government official is insightful and enlightening. I am grateful for the opportunity to comment.

Setting the scene

Faulkner does three things in his chapter. First, he plausibly connects the apparent breach of the rules by Dominic Cummings together with the absence of any formal penalty for that breach with evidence of a subsequent drop in the indices of trust in government and in the level of general compliance with the rules. Second, he suggests that since rational choice theory cannot adequately explain the presence of public trust and general compliance, when they are present – he certainly thinks that it cannot explain their relative resilience or stability – it cannot explain their decline either. And third, he postulates that ‘moral reasons’, and the ‘climate of trust’ that enables them to attain prominence, play a more important role in explaining both trust and compliance than the ‘practical reasons’ invoked in rational choice; and he suggests, in line with that claim, that it is mainly the effect of the Cummings debacle on that climate that explains the subsequent fall in public trust and civic compliance

This general line is persuasive but I feel that more needs to be said about the ‘moral reasons’ that Faulkner invokes in explaining public trust and compliance. And I think that there is also more to say about the relationship between such moral reasons and the ‘practical reasons’ invoked in rational choice theory. I try to say something that bears on both fronts; in doing so I aim to reframe and perhaps strengthen his argument, not to question it.

His characterisation of moral reasons is primarily negative in cast. He chooses the word ‘moral’ rather than ‘normative’, as he explains in a footnote, because it ‘makes the contrast with reasons of self- interest clearer’. And elsewhere his line of argument suggests that thinking that there is a moral reason to act in a certain way is to value that way of acting – say, sincere communication – intrinsically.