Imlisanen Jamir
Our existence in society has always been based on social contracts. From speeding to smoking, nothing in life is risk free.
Despite us being always ambiently aware of risks, the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects has made us acutely sensitive to it. It has pushed us to think beyond questions of personal risk to something much more ethically challenging: When is it morally acceptable for one person to subject another to risk?
Each society settles the risk contract its own way, and that contract evolves over time. Right now, it’s evolving about as fast as the virus. Rather than assuming a right not to be subjected by others to risk, societies have typically come to an agreement that it’s acceptable to impose some risks, provided certain conditions are met.
The pandemic, though, created a new situation. Infecting others with the coronavirus can lead them into serious difficulties. In the worst case they will die, and even in the best case, their life will be disrupted for the isolation period. In the middle are those who acquire long COVID or need hospital treatment, using up resources and contributing to a situation in which hospitals may be overwhelmed and others may be denied urgent, perhaps lifesaving treatment.
Under negotiation right now is the boundary between reasonable and unreasonable COVID-risk mitigations.
Ultimately, few have the training and understanding to know what counts as a serious examination of evidence under conditions of patchy knowledge. The rest of us engage in confirmation bias, seeking out what we regard as the most credible voices that have defended what we are already disposed to believe.
And remember that this behavior is not happening in a vacuum. In a milieu where citizens feel that they have been lied to by governments, exploited by a rapacious medical and pharmacology industry, condescended to by academics, and treated as fools by media elites, trust of authorities long ago evaporated. Low-trust societies have low vaccination rates.
In this pandemic we’ve been making it up as we go: new public-health measures, new vaccines, new medicines. Lagging a bit behind is the new ethics for this new world, by which I mean a revised moral social contract dealing with risk for infectious disease.
Those who share my point of view on mitigation measures may be tempted to say enough already, and that bare-faced vaccine refusers who recklessly infect others should have to compensate their victims and overwhelmed health professionals.
Whatever one thinks about this approach from the point of view of abstract morality, it’s a poisonous public policy. Even if we could identify those who caused harm, just think of the effect of punishing people who already distrust the system. We need to devise ways of drawing more people voluntarily into the risk social contract, rather than pushing them ever further away.
Comments can be sent to imlisanenjamir@gmail.com
