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Social and ethical issues amid pandemic deserve attention

Author  :  WANG YOURAN     Source  :    Chinese Social Sciences Today     2022-01-28

COVID-19 has changed people’s lives in unprecedented ways. In the face of the pandemic, we must obey new rules and make considerable adjustments to our daily lives. According to Hugh Breakey, a senior research fellow in moral philosophy at Griffith University’s Institute for Ethics, Governance, and Law in Australia, disruptions caused by the pandemic will prompt people to think differently about ethical issues and mutual responsibility.

Ethics brought to the forefront

“In usual times, ethics is rarely top of mind,” Breakey said. The pandemic has changed everything. It has highlighted human inter-connectedness and the effects of one’s actions on others. It has challenged people to revisit the basic rules of life: whether and how they could continue to work or study, where they could go, who they could visit. As rules are being rewritten, we have to consider our ethical stance on a range of questions. For instance, is it right or even obligatory to report rule-breakers to the authorities? Is it morally wrong to ignore social distancing rules or refuse to get vaccinated against COVID-19? The ethical dimension of these questions is sometimes downplayed or neglected, because “policy-making is based on scientific evidence.”

However, scientific discoveries are not equivalent to absolute truth. Disagreement is commonplace within the scientific community. Even when scientific conclusions are incontrovertible, public decision-making is unavoidably informed by value judgments about fairness, life, rights, safety, and freedom. Ultimately, the pandemic has made ethical dialogue more common than ever, a change that may well outlast the disease itself. This might be a good thing, encouraging people to think more critically about their moral assumptions, Breakey remarked.

Time needed to tackle ethical issues

“Trust has always been morally and ethically important,” Breakey noted. What differs from the past is that the pandemic has moved questions of trust to the very center of everyday decision-making. People make judgements about government, scientists, pharmaceutical companies, media, and online platforms. The perceived trustworthiness of strangers is pivotal to whether rules will be accepted. Fortunately, trustworthiness is testable. Over time, evidence will confirm or refute hypotheses. The safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines have been in doubt since their release, even though they were approved by public health authorities. Now evidence increasingly shows these vaccines are safe and effective.

When we think about the ethics of a law or a rule, there are many questions to ask. Is it fair? Is it enforced appropriately? Does it work as expected? Is a public consultation process conducted? Does the public understand? Delivering adequate answers to these questions requires a crucial resource: time. In the context of a pandemic, however, governments must respond immediately. The formulation of inclusive, fair, nuanced, and informed rules is difficult when the situation—and people’s understanding of the situation—changes rapidly. This obviously does not excuse shoddy policymaking. However, decision-makers can be forced to make tough choices when there is no ethically sound alternative, and the rest have to cope with a deeply imperfect world in terms of ethics.

Given the various disruptions brought about by the pandemic, many people feel their future is unpredictable and their life is out of control. Expectations, in the form of predictions about the future, are seldom the focus of our ethical thinking. Yet as the British philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham argued, disruption is inherently ethically challenging, because people build their lives around their expectations. They make decisions, plans, and investments based on their expectations, and adapt their preferences accordingly. When those expectations are violated, people can experience not only material losses, but losses to their autonomy and self-efficacy.

In the post-pandemic era

Breakey noted that some of the aforementioned challenges are perennial questions of ethics and politics. For example, how do we enhance the trustworthiness of authorities and increase public trust in them? How can governments improve the legitimacy of their regulations and policies? Other challenges are more specific, such as protecting and managing citizens’ expectations as much as possible when ordinary life is severely disrupted—by a pandemic, as in the current case. Governments need to think carefully about what policies proved workable for their citizenry, and what policies shattered people’s expectations and triggered fear, confusion, and dismay. The questions to be answered now include: are citizens shaping major life decisions on the basis of government responses to the pandemic and, if so, what are the social and economic consequences? Will the COVID-19 pandemic affect people’s behavior in ordinary times? Ethics, as well as many other academic disciplines, is needed to address these questions, including sociology, economics, political science, and psychology. Outside academia, governments should develop policy responses to these challenges.

In Breakey’s opinion, research is very challenging for ethical issues raised by COVID-19 and the ensuing policy measures. Social change and policy responses have implications for many academic fields, and the research focus is a large-scale one. It is therefore extremely difficult to correctly track cause and effect, and distinguish causation from correlation. Obtaining sufficient information from all parts of society is another challenge. Pandemic policies tend to cater to the “typical” citizen, with a “typical” family and a “typical” job. This is understandable. Governments are under pressure to decide quickly without time for full consideration of the impact on diverse groups, and without close consultation with these groups. In the future, scholars should investigate “atypical” cases to reveal how the pandemic and government policies impact less-visible groups.

“The study of ethics will become more important in the post-pandemic era, inviting people to reflect upon what is right and wrong, and empowering them to find answers,” Breakey concluded.

Editor: Yu Hui

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