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Politics, Ethics, and Shutting Down in the Face of Covid-19

Congratulations to our Winners and Runners up in the Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics 2020

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Please join us in congratulating all of the finalists in this unique final for the Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics, and in particular our winners, Eric Sheng and Maya Krishnan. In an Oxford Uehiro Centre first the 6th Annual Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics was held as a Zoom webinar event. The Finalists in each… Read More »Congratulations to our Winners and Runners up in the Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics 2020

Cross Post: Coronavirus: The Conversation We Should Have With Our Loved Ones Now – Leading Medic

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Written by Dominic Wilkinson, University of Oxford

This article was originally published on The Conversation

Waiting is never easy. Sometimes the period when you know that something bad is coming is almost harder than when it finally arrives.

Across the health service, there is an enormous and unprecedented effort underway to prepare for the coming surge of patients needing hospital treatment for coronavirus. Looking across to the experience in Italy, Spain and Germany, we know that there is a tsunami coming – a tidal wave of medical need that will swamp us, test us, sweep some of us away.

The analogy with a tsunami is apt because we are at the moment when the waters pull back before the great wave arrives. Some hospitals are eerily quiet; elective surgery has stopped, and some wards have been emptied. Our healthcare workers are anxiously waiting and preparing for what is coming.

Of course, many ordinary people are also waiting, not knowing exactly what lies ahead and fearing the worst. How can they, how can we – all of us – prepare?

The answer is not to panic. But nor should we ignore or downplay the seriousness of the situation. And certainly, it is not to stockpile pasta or loo paper.Read More »Cross Post: Coronavirus: The Conversation We Should Have With Our Loved Ones Now – Leading Medic

Pandemic ethics: Never again – will we make Covid-19 a warning shot or a dud?

by Anders Sandberg

The Covid-19 pandemic is not the end of the world. But it certainly is a wake-up call. When we look back on the current situation in a year’s time, will we collectively learn the right lessons or instead quickly forget like we did with the 1918 flu? Or even think it was just hype, like Y2K?

There are certainly plenty of people saying this is the new normal, and that things will never be the same. But historically we have adapted to trauma rather well. Maybe too well – we have a moral reason to ensure that we do not forget the harsh lessons we are learning now.

Read More »Pandemic ethics: Never again – will we make Covid-19 a warning shot or a dud?

Coronavirus: Dark Clouds, But Some Silver Linings?

By Charles Foster

Cross posted from The Conversation

To be clear, and in the hope of heading off some trolls, two observations. First: of course I don’t welcome the epidemic. It will cause death, worry, inconvenience and great physical and economic suffering. Lives and livelihoods will be destroyed. The burden will fall disproportionately on the old, the weak and the poor.

And second: these suggestions are rather trite. They should be obvious to reasonably reflective people of average moral sensibility.

That said, here goes:

1. It will make us realise that national boundaries are artificial

The virus doesn’t carry a passport or recognise frontiers. The only way of stopping its spread would be to shut borders wholly, and not even the most rabid nationalists advocate that. It would mean declaring that nations were prisons, with no one coming in or out – or at least not coming back once they’d left. In a world where we too casually assume that frontiers are significant, it doesn’t do any harm to be reminded of the basic fact that humans occupy an indivisible world.

Cooperation between nations is essential to combating the epidemic. That cooperation is likely to undermine nationalist rhetoric.

2. It will make us realise that people are not islands

The atomistic billiard-ball model of the person – a model that dominates political and ethical thinking in the west – is biologically ludicrous and sociologically unsustainable. Our individual boundaries are porous. We bleed into one another and infect one another with both ills and joys. Infectious disease is a salutary reminder of our interconnectedness. It might help us to recover a sense of society.

3. It may encourage a proper sort of localism

Internationalism may be boosted. I hope so. But if we’re all locked up with one another in local quarantine, we might get to know the neighbours and the family members we’ve always ignored. We might distribute ourselves less widely, and so be more present to the people around us.

We might even find out that our local woods are more beautiful than foreign beaches, and that local farmers grow better and cheaper food than that which is shipped (with the associated harm to the climate) across the globe.

4. It may encourage altruism

Exigencies tend to bring out the best and the worst in us. An epidemic may engender and foster altruistic heroes.

5. It may remind us of some neglected constituencies

Mortality and serious illness are far higher among the old, the very young, and those suffering from other diseases. We tend to think about – and legislate for – the healthy and robust. The epidemic should remind us that they are not the only stakeholders.

6. It may make future epidemics less likely

The lessons learned from the coronavirus epidemic will pay dividends in the future. We will be more realistic about the dangers of viruses crossing the barriers between species. The whole notion of public health (a Cinderella speciality in medicine in most jurisdictions) has been rehabilitated. It is plain that private healthcare can’t be the whole answer. Much has been learned about the containment and mitigation of infectious disease. There are strenuous competitive and cooperative efforts afoot to develop a vaccine, and vaccines against future viral challenges are likely to be developed faster as a result.

7. It might make us more realistic about medicine

Medicine is not omnipotent. Recognising this might make us more aware of our vulnerabilities. The consequences of that are difficult to predict, but living in the world as it really is, rather than in an illusory world, is probably a good thing. And recognising our own vulnerability might make us more humble and less presumptuous.

8. Wildlife may benefit

China has announced a permanent ban on trade in and consumption of wildlife. That in itself is hugely significant from a conservation, an animal welfare, and a human health perspective. Hopefully other nations will follow suit.

Read More »Coronavirus: Dark Clouds, But Some Silver Linings?

Pandemic Ethics: Infectious Pathogen Control Measures and Moral Philosophy

By Jonathan Pugh and Tom Douglas

Listen to Jonathan Pugh and Tom Douglas on Philosophical Disquisitions  discussing  Covid 19 and the Ethics of Infectious Disease Control, a podcast interview that was inspired by this blog.

Following the outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, a number of jurisdictions have implemented restrictive measures to prevent the spread of this highly contagious pathogen. In January, Chinese authorities effectively quarantined the entire city of Wuhan, the epicentre of the outbreak, which has a population of around 11 million people. There has since been much discussion of various measures that might be implemented now or in the future to counter the spread, including various forms of social distancing, further mass quarantines and lockdowns, closed borders, mandatory testing and screening and even potentially forced treatment.

There are important questions about the lawfulness of infectious pathogen control (IPC) measures. Here, though, we focus on the moral justification of IPC. How can moral philosophy help us to think through when and whether different IPC measures ought to be employed?

To do so, we will briefly summarise our analysis of the different ways non-consensual medical interventions can be justified in infectious diseases control and criminal justice settings, which we originally published open access here.

 

Read More »Pandemic Ethics: Infectious Pathogen Control Measures and Moral Philosophy

Pandemic Ethics: How Much Risk Should Social Care Workers and Their Families Be Expected to Take?

By Doug McConnell

Recently many of the staff at an aged-care home in Sydney, Australia called in sick the day after the report of a CoVid-19 outbreak at that facility.1 Upon investigation of these absences, one of the reasons the workers gave was that they were concerned about protecting their own families. They didn’t want to act as a vector transferring the disease from the aged care home to their own homes.  So how much risk should social care workers and their families be obliged to take when responding to infectious diseases like CoVid-19?Read More »Pandemic Ethics: How Much Risk Should Social Care Workers and Their Families Be Expected to Take?

Pandemic Ethics: the Unilateralist Curse and Covid-19, or Why You Should Stay Home

by Anders Sandberg

In Scientific American Zeynep Tufekci writes:

Preparing for the almost inevitable global spread of this virus, … , is one of the most pro-social, altruistic things you can do in response to potential disruptions of this kind.

We should prepare, not because we may feel personally at risk, but so that we can help lessen the risk for everyone.

…you should prepare because your neighbors need you to prepare—especially your elderly neighbors, your neighbors who work at hospitals, your neighbors with chronic illnesses, and your neighbors who may not have the means or the time to prepare because of lack of resources or time.

I think this is well put. As a healthy middle-aged academic my personal risk of dying from Covid-19 seems modest – maybe about 0.4% if I get it, which in turn might be below 10% depending on how widespread the virus becomes. But I could easily spread the disease to people who are far more vulnerable, either directly or indirectly. Even slowing the spread is valuable since it helps avoid overloading the medical system at the peak of the epidemic.Read More »Pandemic Ethics: the Unilateralist Curse and Covid-19, or Why You Should Stay Home

Cross Post: Climate change: How do I cope with inevitable decline?

Written by Neil Levy

Originally published in The Conversation

I recently watched an interview with David Attenborough, in which he was asked whether there is hope that things can get better for our planet. He replied that we can only slow down the rate at which things get worse. It seems to me that this is the first time in history we have known things will get worse for the foreseeable future. How do you live in the shadow of such rapid and inevitable decline? And how can you cope with the guilt? Paul, 42, London.

I agree that we live in a unique moment in history. This isn’t like a war or an economic recession, where you know things will be bad for a few years but eventually improve. Never before have we known that the deterioration of not just our countries, but our entire planet, will continue for the foreseeable future – no matter what we do. As Attenborough says, we can (and should) fight to slow the rate at which things get worse, even though we can’t realistically hope for improvement.

Read More »Cross Post: Climate change: How do I cope with inevitable decline?