Political Philosophy in a Pandemic

Routes to a More Just Future

Fay Niker, Aveek Bhattacharya, Fay Niker, Aveek Bhattacharya

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350225923
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Government lockdowns, school closures, mass unemployment, health and wealth inequality. Political Philosophy in a Pandemic asks us, where do we go from here? What are the ethics of our response to a radically changed, even more unequal society, and how do we seize the moment for enduring change? Addressing the moral and political implications of pandemic response from states and societies worldwide, the 20 essays collected here cover the most pressing debates relating to the biggest public health crisis in the last century. Discussing the pandemic in five key parts covering social welfare, economic justice, democratic relations, speech and misinformation, and the relationship between justice and crisis, this book reflects the fruitful combination of political theory and philosophy in laying the theoretical and practical foundations for justice in the long-term.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Aveek Bhattacharya and Fay Niker

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This book started its life in what we now, in hindsight, refer to as the first lockdown. In April 2020, we collected some early reflections from philosophers and political theorists on the ethical dimensions of the developing COVID-19 pandemic and published them on Justice Everywhere, the blog we help to run (Bhattacharya and Niker 2020). We soon noticed a few common themes running through the contributions. One was the idea that although the pandemic itself was unprecedented, many of the issues it has raised link to long-running questions of justice and political contestation. A second was the impulse to draw on these moral ideas and political debates to try to create a better society as we attempt to overcome the current crisis and to envisage the world beyond it.

It is common to note that crisis and opportunity often go together. There is something a little uncomfortable about this idea, in one sense. This discomfort perhaps comes from the thought that we shouldn’t be thinking about the opportunities that a crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic offers; something about this forward-looking orientation seems not to pay due attention to the human tragedy currently being lived through. And this can certainly be the case when it comes to certain kinds of opportunism. For example, Naomi Klein opens her book The Shock Doctrine (2008) by describing how entrepreneurs viewed the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 as an opportunity for property development and remaking the city’s school system. One of New Orleans’ wealthiest developers, Joseph C. Canizaro, epitomised the attitude behind what Klein has called ‘disaster capitalism’ when he said: ‘I think we have a clean sheet to start again. And with that clean sheet we have some very big opportunities’ (Rivlin 2005; cited in Klein 2008: 4).

There is clearly a different attitude motivating the ‘build back better’ impulse, which has been animating efforts across societies at framing what the pandemic recovery should involve and what our post-pandemic world should look like. The dramatic rupture to ‘business as usual’ that crises produce opens up space for collective reflection, political contestation and policy change. There are at least two reasons for this. First, in dramatically disrupting the status quo, crises invite us – individually and collectively – to take stock, to reflect on and assess our existing situation. By exposing our vulnerabilities and highlighting deep social problems (often through exacerbating them), they summon us to consider how to redress, repair and rebuild our societies. Second, crises require that we take drastic steps. Such actions either remind us or demonstrate to us what we are capable of and what is politically possible. By showing that other worlds are possible, crises can inject more agency back into political discourse, since it is much more difficult for politicians to mobilise a sense of inevitability around the status quo.

Clearly, the current pandemic has the two features outlined above. First, the virus has picked at societal wounds, opening them for all to see. As many of the chapters in this collection detail, several forms of injustice that pre-dated the crisis have contributed to the damage caused by the virus, been worsened by it, or both – for example, educational inequalities, intergenerational inequity or inadequacy of housing. And it has also increased the spotlight on other ethical and political questions, such as how to address the problem of misinformation and disinformation being proliferated on social media. Second, we have seen fundamental changes and monumental achievements that could barely have been envisaged pre-pandemic. Individuals have made significant sacrifices and dramatically altered their behaviour – consuming less, travelling less and working from home. At a societal level, we have seen an outpouring of solidarity and appreciation for ‘key workers’ previously taken for granted. And governments have quickly produced bold and far-reaching policies, on a scale rarely seen outside of wartime, to guarantee economic security and temporarily end homelessness. A natural question, explored in a number of chapters, is whether these positive trends will continue beyond the crisis. And if not, why not – since we have already seen what is achievable?

The contributions to this volume explore the relationship between crisis and opportunity in an effort to set out routes to a more just world after the pandemic. In so doing, the volume examines a set of distinctively political-philosophical issues raised by the COVID-19 crisis. Some of these are obvious (e.g. the issue of what to do about elections scheduled during a pandemic); some are less obvious, but not necessarily any less important for that (e.g. how public health measures undermine our democratic culture). So, while the book touches upon important issues in medical and public health ethics, it is primarily a collection of essays in political theory. It is comprised of five parts, each picking out a major theme in the social and political fallout of the pandemic. The first is social welfare and vulnerability, which includes essays on the social determinants of health and the corrosive nature of disadvantage, the vulnerability of children during school closures, and the right to adequate housing. The second theme is economic justice and includes discussions of precarity, universal basic income, and intergenerational justice. The third part discusses questions relating to democratic relations, such as the two mentioned above – whether and how we should hold elections during a pandemic and the pandemic’s effects on the democratic way of life – and others relating to the discriminatory assumptions underlying lockdown measures and whose voices should (and should not) count in legitimating pandemic-responsive policy. The fourth theme is speech and (mis)information, which examines issues such as whether efforts to repress misinformation about COVID-19 on social media violate freedom of speech, and the moral permissibility of shaming those who flout social distancing guidelines. Lastly, the essays in the fifth part examine the relationship between crisis and justice, including essays on the pandemic as an experiment in egalitarian living for the middle classes and on the lessons that we might take from the COVID-19 crisis for climate justice. This focus on the political-theoretical questions makes this book a valuable complement to other, vital collections that have concentrated on questions of public health ethics (e.g. Schwartz 2020).

Since we first began working on this book, many of those with whom we have discussed it have asked us if it will cover some or other significant aspect of pandemic: the ethics of vaccination and vaccine distribution, the legitimacy of restricting freedom of movement to slow the spread of the virus, and individuals’ duties to inform themselves regarding the virus and restrictions, to name a few. In several such cases, we have, with regret, informed them that it does not. COVID-19 has been an all-consuming phenomenon, touching on almost every aspect of our lives and societies. This book does not make any claim to comprehensiveness in its coverage of the moral and political philosophy of the pandemic, even despite the wide range of pressing and interesting topics included here. There are certainly many worthy issues we have not addressed. As Onora O’Neill notes in her Foreword, these essays have been written ‘mid-pandemic’, most before we went into the second lockdown in the UK. We are now in ‘Lockdown 3.0’ – something that we couldn’t have foreseen at the start of this project – and even with the vaccine rollout under way, there is still no certainty about how much longer this pandemic will last. And once the virus itself is under control, the hard work of rebuilding will only be beginning. Thus, this collection of essays is offered as the start of a crucial and ongoing conversation, and certainly not as the final word.

In the spirit of Justice Everywhere, the essays in this volume are academically rigorous but accessibly written attempts to apply insights from moral and political philosophy to contribute to our understanding of the pandemic – of what has happened and what should come next. They do not assume background knowledge; we hope, therefore, that they will be understandable and interesting not only to academic political theorists, but also to students (e.g. of politics, philosophy, public policy) and to anyone with a general interest in the questions we raise. The authors have also included some suggestions for further reading with their chapter, for those who may want to explore the ideas in more depth.

Overview of the chapters

One of the most significant aspects of the pandemic in terms of its impact on political culture may prove to be the vivid way that it has demonstrated the harms wrought by social inequality. As many of our contributors observe, among the most insidious aspects of COVID-19 is the way that it’s effects have disproportionately hit some of the worst off in society. That is the phenomenon explored by Jonathan Wolff and Avner de-Shalit in Chapter 2. Drawing on some of the concepts developed in their book Disadvantage, they describe how COVID-19 demonstrates the harm of ‘corrosive disadvantage’, where deficits in one domain (e.g. lack of money) lead to deficits in another (e.g. worsened health), as well as ‘inverse cross-category risk’, where disadvantaged people are forced to trade off important goods (e.g. having to choose between financial and physical security). In the case of the pandemic, they argue that these dynamics have proved particularly acute for ethnic minorities in the US and UK.

The COVID-19 pandemic has, then, brought questions of distribution to the fore. Nowhere have they been so significant as in the healthcare system, where tough decisions have had to be made as to how to prioritise and allocate treatment. In Chapter 3, Sara Van Goozen reviews some of the decision rules that philosophers have proposed and medics have used in the past. In light of the experience of the current pandemic, she argues that these should be amended so that people with instrumental value in terms of fighting the virus, such as doctors, research scientists and perhaps even delivery drivers, should be fast-tracked towards the front of the queue.

Of course, the pandemic has not just had negative consequences for people’s health and financial welfare, but its impact has also been felt in education and housing as well. In both of these domains, too, there has been a clear social gradient in the harms suffered. In Chapter 4, Nicolás Brando and Katarina Pitasse Fragoso consider the impact of school closures, as occurred in many countries around the world. They argue that the shift to online teaching failed the most vulnerable children in two major ways: compounding their educational disadvantage and putting their mental, emotional and physical well-being at greater risk. Beyond the current crisis, their article suggests that the move towards online schooling (a source of great enthusiasm in the educational community) is likely to widen rather than narrow inequalities. In Chapter 5, David Jenkins, Katy Wells and Kimberley Brownlee explore how government lockdowns should inform our understanding of adequate housing. They show that living in inadequate dwellings entails greater harm when confined to that dwelling under lockdown. They also show that housing that would be considered adequate under normal circumstances can become inadequate when the inhabitants are required to spend most of their time there. They argue that governments should respond by showing greater urgency in securing the right to adequate housing for all and by addressing some of the issues highlighted by the pandemic, such as many people’s lack of access to outside space.

A key theme uniting many of the contributions to the book, and particularly those in Part I, is the idea that the negative impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been mediated through economic inequalities and vulnerabilities. Part II therefore focuses on questions of economic justice raised by the pandemic. All three chapters argue that while the economic challenges we have faced and continue to face, and the responses they have generated, are on a larger scale than what we have seen before, the fundamental issues that gave rise to them long pre-date the current crisis. In different ways, each makes the case for a fundamental reset of our economic settlement and infrastructure.

David Yarrow begins in Chapter 6 with the question of how governments should go about paying off the huge public debts that have been amassed because of the pandemic. His chapter considers the claim that older people should bear more of the cost, either because they have received greater health benefits or because they have suffered less economic difficulty as a result of measures to control the virus. He argues that such notions have their basis in a luck egalitarian intuition but apply that normative framework too narrowly. He calls for governments to take a broader perspective and recognise that the economic vulnerability of younger generations is the consequence of a longer-term trend of privatisation and individualisation of the welfare state – a trend that must be reversed for fundamental intergenerational injustices to be righted.

In Chapter 7, Lisa Herzog picks up where Yarrow leaves off, describing in more detail ‘the great risk shift’ of recent decades that saw governments and businesses (especially in English-speaking countries) divest themselves of their obligations to their citizens and workers, leaving individuals more exposed to reversals of fortune. This has led, she observes, to an increase in ‘economic precarity’, which has contributed to the harm caused by measures to control the spread of COVID-19. In response, she advocates a return to the principle of social insurance, with a stronger safety net guaranteeing greater economic security against future downturns.

Diana Popescu shares a similar diagnosis to Yarrow and Herzog, seeing existing welfare states as deeply inadequate for the challenges faced by modern societies. However, she is dissatisfied with Herzog’s proposal for a system oriented around social insurance. Instead of seeing social protection as a way of sharing individual risks across society, in Chapter 8 Popescu argues that a better reflection of the values and moral motivations demonstrated in our response to the COVID-19 crisis would be a regime based on social solidarity, recognising our common concern for one another. Such a regime, in her view, would involve a universal basic income for every citizen.

The pandemic has prompted governments to take dramatic, often unprecedented actions such as issuing stay-at-home orders to citizens and forcing businesses to close their doors for prolonged periods. This raises several deep political questions about legitimacy and democracy, which are the focus of Part III. In Chapter 9, Rowan Cruft takes on the question of how public support for a policy, for instance relating to the imposition or lifting of lockdown measures, contributes to the democratic legitimation of that policy’s imposition. Specifically, he considers a largely neglected aspect of this issue: whose voices count in legitimating pandemic-responsive policy, and when? Cruft argues that the force of arguments – say, in favour of reopening the economy or schools – varies depending on who makes them, and on how these arguments treat the views and interests of others within their society. His chapter offers a new way of thinking about why some kinds of public support for a policy often do little to confer legitimacy on it.

Chapter 10 also engages with pandemic-responsive policy, and lockdown restrictions in particular, but raises questions about justifiability from the perspective of the design of these measures and what this reveals about governments’ discriminatory assumptions about our social lives. Felix Pinkert contends that the ‘household model’ assumes a particular picture of social life that is outdated and has had harmful and discriminatory consequences for people – non-cohabiting couples and single people, for example – who do not fit this model. Governmental attempts to address this problem in an ad hoc fashion have revealed further discriminatory assumptions – in this case, of the elevated significance given to sexual relationships relative to other relationships. As a result, Pinkert argues that policymakers should better interrogate their social biases and seek out more neutral measures, for example, giving people a ‘contact budget’ that can be used to see any nominated others, regardless of one’s relationship to them.

The two other chapters in Part III focus on democracy, in its formal and informal modes, respectively. In Chapter 11, Alexandru Volacu describes the ‘pandemic electoral trilemma’ facing polities with elections due during the coronavirus crisis. The three broad options on the table are to go ahead as usual with in-person voting, to switch to convenience voting mechanisms, or to postpone elections. Volacu argues that each of these options is bound to violate some plausible principle of electoral justice, but that depending on the context these concerns can be at least partially defused. The threat to formal democracy, described by Volacu, has received a lot of attention. What has gone largely unnoticed is the way in which COVID-19 has impacted on democracy as a lived practice by blocking everyday social connections. Marc Stears draws attention to and explains this danger in Chapter 12, before outlining three ways in which our collective response to COVID-...