Penn Pandemic Diary Penn Pandemic Diary, Entry #33: Ethics in Emergencies

Eilidh Beaton is a Graduate Associate at Perry World House and a 2020 Ph.D. graduate in Philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania.

In early March, when the COVID-19 outbreak reached crisis levels in Italy, newspapers were flooded with stories on one emerging ethical issue. Because the need for intensive care facilities had outstripped the available supply, medical practitioners were engaging in “catastrophe medicine”. Forced to treat some ahead of others, they were, in effect, deciding who would live and who would die.

Now, as the virus has spread across the US, scholarly and media attention has focused on the racial and socioeconomic disparities of the effects of COVID-19. Even if the virus itself does not discriminate along these lines, pre-pandemic institutions do. Low income Americans, especially Black Americans, are disproportionately likely to experience environmental risk factors; be employed in low-wage essential jobs; and face barriers to accessing effective healthcare – all factors that increase vulnerability to COVID-19.

In similar ways, COVID-19 is likely to have a huge impact in the weeks and months ahead on refugees and other displaced populations. The vast majority of globally displaced people live in densely-populated environments like cities and camps where social distancing is extremely challenging, and many are hosted in low-income countries where health systems are often weak or inaccessible. As COVID-19 spreads, it threatens to reveal, in brutal terms, the implications of extreme global inequality.

These topics of past, present, and future concern all have one thing in common: they involve the kinds of questions normative philosophers write about. Even before the pandemic, ethicists were developing theories about how to prepare for and respond to difficult ethical decisions in moments of crisis. Philosophers of race and political philosophers were analyzing unjust policies and institutional arrangements and proposing alternative, fairer ways of structuring society. Scholars working in global justice were critiquing the stark inequalities in the international distribution of wealth, and explaining how the division of the world into sovereign states creates unacceptable protection gaps for refugees and other displaced people.

Given the pre-existing scholarly interest in these topic areas, it is unsurprising that recent months have seen a proliferation of “public philosophy” pieces discussing the ethical controversies in our new COVID-19 world. Some articles directly address questions like those outlined above, providing accounts of how to distribute ventilator access in contexts of scarcity, or how to weigh the psychological harms of ongoing self-isolation against the risk of a second wave if countries reopen. Others simply reframe broader research questions in terms of the current situation – examining, for instance, whether the 1951 Refugee Convention should be expanded to provide protection to more groups of people, including (now) those fleeing harms associated with COVID-19.

However, another central theme has emerged in these discussions. When push comes to shove, what value does philosophy – of disaster ethics or any other kind – have in crisis situations?

Of course, philosophers are not essential workers. They do not provide vital transportation, or sanitation, or medical services. Still, philosophers might reasonably hope that the theories they spent their pre-COVID-19 years defending might now be of some small use to policymakers and decision-makers. But some question even this modest claim. Now that we are facing the realities of a crisis head-on, theories developed from the armchair in safer times no longer feel so certain. Naturally, various defenses of the importance of philosophy at this time have also been offered.

I suspect that some areas of philosophy – particularly philosophy of race and political philosophy – do have demonstrable value in these times. Scholars in these fields have improved our collective understanding of the nature of racial and economic injustice, and have offered suggestions for reform – admittedly, some more helpful than others. But the debates about the value of disaster ethics are less certain. In my own view, there are no obvious answers here. I feel the pull of both sides in this debate.

Perhaps, though, instead of framing the current moment as a time for these philosophers to provide answers, we could instead think of it as a period in which we should be asking more questions. Why do we feel uncomfortable when forced to apply theoretical recommendations that seemed uncontroversial in the classroom? Is there something about the stakes, the uncertainty, the risks, and, more broadly, the lived experience of crisis situations that is missing from our theory? And if so, how can we – as scholars working on issues of potential practical significance – learn from these trying times?

The views expressed in the Penn Pandemic Diary are solely the author’s and not those of Penn or Perry World House.