COVID-19 and the Global Ethics Freefall (Repost) – Sridhar Venkatapuram
This piece is an adapted version of a blog entry that was first published on the Hastings Center for Bioethics Forum on 19 March 2020. It is republished here courtesy of the Hastings Center and Sridhar Vekatapuram.
Since the initial outbreak in Wuhan last December, the national and global responses to COVID-19 have been in ethics freefall. Chinese scholars wrote on the Hastings Centre Bioethics Forum about the death of Dr. Li Wenliang, and how he was detained and reprimanded for raising the alarm about a novel infectious disease. As the Chinese government implemented drastic measures, including quarantining over 50 million people and other policies such as monitoring and regulating movements of hundreds of millions through smartphone apps, very few observers raised the issue of ethics or the now seemingly forgotten concept of human rights. There was also little talk about ethics when Japan quarantined passengers on a cruise ship without making significant efforts to stop infections among passengers. Or when it inexplicably released all the passengers who then dispersed worldwide. There has also been little talk about ethics regarding Iran’s ability to manage its epidemic with ongoing U.S. economic sanctions.
Following the WHO’s recommendations, most countries have been implementing widespread testing, contact tracing, isolation, and other social distancing polices to reduce physical interactions between individuals. The United Kingdom, however, decided to pursue a different and controversial path. Initially, the U.K. did not mandating strong physical distancing policies or made testing widely available. Instead, it aimed to create herd immunity. Based on various models with diverse assumptions, the government is planning for 40 million people to become infected. With a 1% mortality rate (the estimated mortality rate in other countries), approximately 400,000 people would likely die.
It is classic and brutal utilitarian ethical calculation: creating herd immunity will potentially save lives in the long term and conserve other socially valuable goods (economy) which are greater than the costs of implementing socially disruptive policies and resource investments now to prevent as many deaths as possible of the 1% to 5% who are most vulnerable. The greatest risk is to older people and those with chronic diseases and conditions– and probably the most socially disadvantaged.
The U.K. government’s lack of transparency about the epidemiological models and reasoning behind the policies, and default to utilitarian calculations shows that past two decades of public health/global health ethics scholarship has had little impact. Of particular concern, at a time when hundreds of thousands of citizens’ lives are at stake, the British leadership is reverting to what Bernard Williams scathingly described as “Government House Utilitarianism.” That is, some of the great advocates of utilitarianism argued that secrecy may be necessary to achieve a utilitarian conclusion, as the uneducated might not understand the ambiguity or complexity, much less find it palatable. It is now becoming more clear that some bioethicists have also been working in secret as government advisors.
Over the past four decades, I and other philosophers have argued that the distribution of health and disease reflects the way we organize our societies, and how we relate to each other. Living together allows us to create goods that help us pursue our life plans. And living together also exposes us to burdens, and harms. Public health ethics is not primarily or foremostly about the conflict between the interests of the few versus the greater good. It is about how we organize our society, how we relate to one another, to ensure that every individual is able to pursue a good life. From this perspective, the people who are currently infected with COVID-19, as well as older people and those with serious health conditions, are not the few whose rights need to be balanced against the greater good. Each of those individuals are equal members our society whose abilities to live good lives are at risk. If there are decisions to be made about whose lives are to be saved first, or what other socially valued goods need to be protected, justice demands that there be public deliberation, or as philosophers call it, the “publicity requirement.”
Indeed, this talk of ethics and public deliberation during a pandemic may seem superfluous to those who admire how the Chinese government acted boldly, and with unprecedented scale. It pursued actions for the greater good, and apparently gave a gift to the world by slowing infections down by weeks. But outbreaks and their progression into epidemics and pandemics reflect the way we organize our social institutions and relate to each other. There is much work here–for those courageous enough–to show how social inequities and injustice produced the outbreak and the way it is progressing so differently within and across societies.
But more presently, our jobs now as health ethicists throughout the world is to help support national and global responses to think harder and better. Everyone is a global ethicist now.
Sridhar Venkatapuram is Associate Professor of global health and philosophy at King’s College London. He is on Twitter: @sridhartweet
Image by Martin Sanchez on Unsplash.