Full Description
The COVID-19 pandemic is a defining event of the 21st century. It has taken over eighteen million lives, closed national borders, put whole populations into quarantine and devastated economies.
Yet while COVID-19 is catastrophic, it is not unique. Children who have been home-schooled during COVID-19 will almost certainly face another pandemic in their lifetime - one at least as bad-and potentially much worse-than this one. The WHO has referred to such a future (currently unknown) pathogen as "Disease X".
The defining feature of a pandemic is its scale-the simultaneous threat to millions or even billions of lives. That scale leads to unavoidable ethical dilemmas since the lives and livelihood of all cannot be protected.
But since one of the most powerful ways of arresting the spread of a pandemic is to reduce contact between people, pandemic ethics also challenges some of our most widely accepted ethical beliefs about individual liberty and autonomy.
Finally, pandemic ethics brings vividly to the foreground debates about the structure of society, inequalities, disadvantage and our global responsibilities.
In this timely and vital collection, Dominic Wilkinson and Julian Savulescu bring together a global team of leading philosophers, lawyers, economists, and bioethicists. The book reviews the COVID-19 pandemic to ask not only 'did our societies make the right ethical choices?', but also 'what lessons must we learn before Disease X arrives?'
Contents
Introduction
Part I. Global response to the pandemic
Larry Gostin: The Great Coronavirus Pandemic: An Unparalleled Collapse in Global Solidarity
Allen Buchanan: Institutionalising the duty to rescue in a global health emergency
John Tasioulas: The Uneasy Relationship Between Human Rights and Public Health: Lessons from Covid-19
Part II. Liberty
Jenny Blumenthal-Barby: Bringing Nuance to Autonomy-Based Considerations in Vaccine Mandate Debates
Jessica Flanigan: The risks of prohibition during pandemics
Frances Kamm: Handling Future Pandemics: Harming, Not Aiding, and Liberty
Govind Persad and Ezekiel Emanuel: Against Procrustean Public Health: Two Vignettes
Julian Savulescu: Selective Lockdowns: Can they be Justified?
Part III. Balancing ethical values
Alex Voorhoeve, Marc Fleurbaey, Matt Adler and Richard Bradley: How to Balance Lives and Livelihoods
Dominic Wilkinson: Pluralism and Allocation of Limited Resources: Vaccines and Ventilators
G. Owen Schaefer: Fairly and Pragmatically Prioritizing Global Allocation of Scarce Vaccines During a Pandemic
Kristina Orfali: Tragic choices during the COVID-19 pandemic: the past and the future
Part IV. Pandemic equality and inequality
Michael Parker: Ethical hotspots in infectious disease surveillance for global health security: social justice and pandemic preparedness
Sreenivasan Subramanian: COVID-19: An Unequal and Disequalising Pandemic
Fabio A G Oliveira: Pandemic and structural comorbidity: Lasting social injustices in Brazil Maria Clara Dias
Eisuke Nakazawa and Akira Akabayashi: Social Distancing and Fairness in Japan
Part V. Pandemic X
Nethanel Lipshitz, Jeffrey Kahn, Ruth R. Faden: Pondering The Next Pandemic: Liberty, Justice, and Democracy in the COVID-19 Pandemic
