The answer is no, it isn’t. Please stay home.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think that getting sick is that big of a deal. I can handle the discomfort of a flu, and so can you. But if I had a choice between you punching me in the face and you giving me a flu, I would prefer the punch as long as you didn’t break anything.

Why is the relatively mild punch to the face clearly unethical and going to work sick is not? It’s because when it comes to getting sick, we suffer from magical thinking.  When it comes to mysterious misfortunes, we tend to rely on magic potions, magic words, magic thoughts, or magic feathers. If punches to the face were a mysterious misfortune that struck with no clear puncher or intended punchee, we would probably have a whole range of face-punch invulnerability talismans, herbs, and spells. And going to work when you might punch someone would not seem like an ethical question.

Remember how everyone in your office got the flu this winter and it was so bad that it was funny and you sat in a meeting and sympathized with a sick colleague as they described their distress, and then later joked about how you probably got it from them? That was possible only because neither of you could see the mechanism of infection or feel the viral load enter your bloodstream when you rubbed your eye. The vivid experience of a perpetration would limit the possibility of magical thinking, and going to work sick would become an obvious ethical question.