social responsibility Archives

June 18, 2021December 14, 2022

Time for Social Conscription?

photograph of Uncle Same "We Want You!" poster

The metaphor of war has been widely employed during the pandemic. Donald Trump characterized the virus as the “invisible enemy,” Boris Johnson declared himself the head of a wartime government, Narendra Modi envisioned the ‘Tika Utsav’ (a vaccination festival) as the start of the second Indian war on COVID-19, and even the WHO recommended the suspension of vaccine patents to secure the world’s “war footing.” Using the language of conflict to convey the pandemic’s threat and rally our march toward its defeat has been a regular feature of discourse worldwide.

The deployment of this kind of combat analogy isn’t novel. Similar language was used by Brazil officials during the 2018 Zika outbreak, by Nixon in the 1970s ‘war on drugs,’ and by contemporary conservative commentators to decry the ‘war on Christmas.’ And, while its appropriateness is sometimes questionable, the power which such an illustrative framing possesses is often considerable.

Conceptualizing challenges as battles elicits an ‘us v. them’ mentality. In the COVID-19 context, it provides a common enemy (the virus), a retaliatory strategy (flattening the curve), the soldiers (clinical staff), the home-front (people isolating), and the saboteurs (those breaking lockdown rules). The idea of uniting to fight an adversary capable of causing such catastrophic harm was used to justify the rapid closing of schools, bars, sporting events, the restrictions on domestic and international travel, and the general reduction in the freedoms many enjoyed pre-pandemic. Echoing WWII’s campaigns like ‘Dig for Victory,’ we’re repeatedly told that we must do our part to prevent disaster, preserve vital services and resources, and save lives.

The demands on state resources worldwide have reinforced a picture not dissimilar from that of a mass global conflict. Hospitals overrun with patients, a lack of available qualified staff, panic-hoarding and rationing of goods, as well as fear of potentially compromised foreign individuals, all elicit similar feelings of dread in the face of an uncertain future. Indeed, living under the shadow of war and the shadow of a pandemic has some palpable thematic similarities.

Yet, one aspect of the wartime era has been notably absent in the discussion about how governments might rise to meet the significant demands placed on public services during a pandemic: conscription; that is, people’s mandatory enlistment into national service.

This practice is typically reserved for compelling people into military service because war is broadly seen as the only event that could justify such a coercive social program. However, there are plenty that believe obligatory military service represents an important public good even in peacetime. In the U.K., for example, the prospect of military conscription’s reinstatement has been floated by politicians, commentators, as well as royals. Additionally, the U.K.’s public appears to possess an appetite for its restoration, with 48% of respondents to a 2018 YouGov poll and 43%-47% of respondents to a similar 2016 poll favoring compulsory military service for young people.

But, if it is appropriate to think of the pandemic as a war, shouldn’t a conscription program for non-military, social roles — such as the U.K.’s National Health Service or Italy’s Servizio Sanitario Nazionale — be considered?

Non-military conscription isn’t new. Germany, Austria, Finland, Switzerland, amongst others, have utilized a conscription service to ensure citizens contribute to social services in the past. However, this form of national service is generally employed as an alternative to military conscription, not a separate, preferable option. Social conscription is typically framed as the secondary option, something that is only considered in countries that employ military conscription as their default service option. But, a program of social conscription may not simply be a backup alternative for those who don’t wish to be involved in the armed forces. Rather, there is a compelling argument that the former avoids several of the latter’s more troubling ethical implications.

Chief amongst these criticisms concerns the methods employed by the armed forces to achieve their goals. The military secures its objectives via the threat of violence. Coercing people via social and judicial means to serve in an industry that invariably leads to the demise of others is hard to justify. Imposing an obligation on citizens to participate in activities that might conflict with their deeply held personal, moral, or religious convictions — like actively supporting the military-industrial complex or contributing to the taking of others’ lives — will strike many as going beyond what any legitimate government can demand of its people. This is why many jurisdictions with military conscription provide an opt-out pathway where individuals can pursue alternative service avenues to serve the public good and do their bit.

Social conscription, on the other hand, does not raise the same problem. Through a national service program that supports well-being-enhancing institutions — such as social care or health services — individuals can assist their communities and countries in a manner comparable to military conscription without being (in)directly involved with the killing of another human being. In fact, they’d be instrumental in the saving of lives.

Social conscription doesn’t simply avoid some of the ethical quandaries associated with military conscription. On the contrary, it possesses benefits that make it not merely relationally preferable to military conscription but inherently preferable, especially during a pandemic. With healthcare services struggling to meet demand due to a lack of available staff, an enormous task force needed to administrate and administer vaccination initiatives, and social care industries besieged by the increased need of their services, a consistent and reliable source of labor in the form of social conscripts may be the most effective way to secure the best possible outcome in the war against COVID-19. And, if increasing well-being, health, and positive results are ethically desirable outcomes, then social conscription may be morally required.

Whether such a program would be practical is something that needs investigation. However, given the appetite for conscription alongside the evident need to bolster those institutions that increase well-being and protect people’s health globally — a need highlighted by the pandemic — social conscription may not be military conscription’s inferior alternative. Rather, it may be its indispensable and desirable superior.

April 23, 2021December 14, 2022

Considered Position: On Voluntary Non-Vaccination – The Difference Voluntariness Makes

photograph of people walking and biking in masks

This piece begins a Considered Position series that examines our evolving moral duty to those choosing to remain unvaccinated.

My state, Florida, recently opened up COVID vaccinations to everyone. This does not quite mean that anyone who wants to be vaccinated can be vaccinated. There are still a limited number of vaccines available, so not everyone who wants to get vaccinated has been able to schedule an appointment. But we are getting close to the point where those who remain unvaccinated are unvaccinated by choice.

This raises a question: does the fact that the vulnerable choose to remain vulnerable make a moral difference to what precautions I should observe? I have the strong intuition that this does make a moral difference; it intuitively seems that imposing risks on the unvaccinated is not as bad when the unvaccinated are unvaccinated by choice. (The evidence increasingly suggests that the vaccinated cannot really spread COVID-19, and if that is confirmed it will render much of this practical discussion moot. However, the underlying philosophical questions are important and worth investigating.)

But is my intuition that I can be less cautious correct?

In this, and two subsequent posts, I will try to answer that question. Each post will be dedicated to one part of an answer.

Part I: What principle underlies the intuition that the voluntariness of non-vaccination makes a difference to my own actions? And is that principle a true moral principle?
Part II: Does it matter why others are choosing not to be vaccinated? Are there differences, for example, in how careful I should be around someone who avoids vaccination because they think COVID-19 is overblown or around a pregnant mother concerned about the lack of trial data in pregnant women?
Part III: How do the complexities of real life complicate the moral calculation? What are the implications of the fact that children cannot get the vaccine without a parent’s permission? And is someone’s choice really voluntary if that person was lied to about the safety of vaccines?

In this first post, I want to investigate what principle might underlie my intuition that I have fewer obligations of caution to those who are voluntarily unvaccinated. To identify the principle at work, it will be useful to start with a simple argument that voluntariness should not make any difference. The thought goes as follows:

During the pandemic, I avoid certain behaviors — such as licking doorknobs — to avoid spreading illness and death.
If someone forgoes vaccination, the reason they forwent vaccination makes no difference to their susceptibility to illness and death.
So, people being unvaccinated by choice makes no difference to my reason to avoid certain behaviors.

Let us call this the ‘simple utilitarian perspective.’ The simple utilitarian thinks that because voluntarily refusing a vaccine conveys no immunological protection, the fact people voluntarily forgo the vaccine makes no difference to my moral calculation. If you are in a community where 40% of people are unvaccinated by choice and I am in a community where 40% of people are unvaccinated because of a limited supply of vaccines, then the simple utilitarian says we are in a morally equivalent position.

The Utilitarian Explanation of the Difference

I call this the ‘simple utilitarian perspective’ because there is a perfectly good utilitarian argument against this reasoning. It is true that it makes no difference to my own risk whether I cannot get a vaccine or whether I choose to not get a vaccine; in either case I am unvaccinated. However, that does not mean that if you compare a random person who could not get the vaccine to a random person who chose to not get the vaccine, that the average risk is the same. Assuming people are at least somewhat rational, people at higher risk are more likely to choose to be vaccinated.

Even if utilitarians only ultimately care about happiness, they still will place some value on freedom. When people are free to make their own choices, they can make choices that are best for themselves. The elderly are at greater risk than the young are. As such the elderly are more likely to choose to vaccinate. Similarly, those who are very healthy — and without any risk factors for COVID-19 — are more likely to forgo vaccination because their risks of contracting it are smaller.

All this means that it’s probably safer to resume licking doorknobs once everyone had the choice to get the vaccine because those at highest risk will also be vaccinated at the highest rates.

Going Beyond the Utilitarian Answer — This might partly explain my intuition, but it cannot be the whole story. This is because my intuition persists, even when I know the utilitarian explanation does not apply; for example, even if I know that the person is forgoing a vaccine for a reason unrelated to personal risk — like because ‘vaccines don’t fit with their personal style’ — I still intuitively feel I have less reason to be cautious.

Distributed Responsibility

Part of the intuition is explained, I think, by the fact that people who are unvaccinated by choice will share some of the responsibility when they get sick.

If the only way to prevent people from getting sick is if I stop licking doorknobs, then by licking doorknobs I take on complete responsibility for their illnesses. However, if there are two ways to prevent people getting sick — I stop licking doorknobs or they get vaccinated — then at worst I am only partially responsible. They share in responsibility by declining the vaccine.

If we imagine other more ordinary behaviors, like frequent grocery shopping rather than doorknob licking, then the other person actually bears most of the responsibility for getting sick. It seems more reasonable to ask them to get vaccinated than to ask me to stay indefinitely in lockdown; the more reasonable the choice you reject, the more responsible you are for the consequences of that rejection. (This, then, is why you might feel I am mostly responsible if I really were licking doorknobs; licking doorknobs was not a reasonable thing to be doing in the first place.)

This idea, that the choices of others can mitigate our own responsibility is prominent in both ethics and law. I like how Christine Korsgaard presents the idea in her discussion of our responsibility for the consequences of lying:

“In a Kantian theory our responsibility has definite boundaries: each person as a first cause exerts some influence on what happens, and it is your part that is up to you. If you make a straightforward appeal to the reason of another person, your responsibility ends there and the other’s responsibility begins. But the liar tries to take the consequences out of the hands of others; he, and not they, will determine what form their contribution to destiny will take. By refusing to share with others the determination of events, the liar takes the world into his own hands, and makes the events his own.”

Going Beyond the Distributed Responsibility Answer — But if this is the explanation of the intuition, then we have a problem. There is something morally vicious about someone who is solely concerned with avoiding responsibility. The virtuous reason to take precautions is not to avoid responsibility for someone’s death, it is to save people’s lives.

To see this, let’s look at an example from my own life (an example I still look back on with shame).

Years ago, an acquaintance of mine expressed an intent to commit suicide. I became deeply distressed, was unsure how to proceed, and grew paralyzed by indecision. So, I reached out to two mentors of mine, both of whom had experience working with suicidal people.

Reaching out was the correct thing to do; I did not know how best to offer help. The problem was the reason I reached out for help. Ultimately, it was not so that I could better support this acquaintance. Rather, I was racked by anxiety about messing up and becoming responsible for the person’s death. I reached out to these mentors because I knew that it would be irresponsible to not follow their advice. Deep down, I wanted to reach out because that way, even if the person did kill herself, at least I would not be blameworthy.

Why think this is morally perverse? Most simply because my own guilt was not the important good at stake in the choice. The thing that mattered was my acquaintance getting the help she needed; decreasing my own culpability if things went badly was not anywhere near as important! (For a more detailed discussion of the way in which a concern for our own responsibility distorts our moral reasoning, see Elizabeth Anscombe’s article “On Being in Good Faith.”)

Reasons of Justice

Even though we should not be strongly motivated by a concern to avoid responsibility; there is a close connection between what we should do and what we would be responsible for not doing. So, this difference in how responsible I would be if someone gets sick might not explain why I have weaker reasons to take precautions, but it is evidence that my reasons are weaker.

But if I do have weaker reasons, then that must mean that my reasons to take precautions are not quite so simple as I have reasons to keep people from getting sick. And this is the key to unlocking the puzzle. While I do have reasons to lower the risk that other people get sick, I have especially important reasons of justice to give people control over their own risk.

Before the vaccine is widely available, if I go around engaging in ordinary risky activities, I impose risks on others that they cannot reasonably avoid. They have no control over whether what I do poses a risk to them. As such, it is reasonable to expect me to forgo certain activities for the sake of maintaining some minimal freedom for others.

After the vaccine is widely available, however, the risks I impose on others are risks that can be reasonably avoided. Others have control over how large a risk my frequent grocery shopping imposes on them. People have the option of safety. Whether they take that option makes some difference to my reasons for infrequent grocery shopping; but it is a less stringent reason than my reasons of justice to avoid imposing unavoidable risks.

Justice is that virtue which enables us to live our own life in community with others; as such, it is the virtue that sets boundaries on what I can choose, where those boundaries mutually accommodate the choices of others. We can drive faster now that every car comes equipped with seatbelts. Why? Not because everyone always uses their seatbelts, but because everyone having access to seatbelts ensures that everyone has a free option that allows them to maintain their previous level of safety even as I start driving faster on highways.

Justice is focused on whether people have choices of health, and not whether people are healthy. For example, justice requires that we provide those who are starving with food, but it does not require us to force feed someone who refuses to eat. Were this not true, then justice could actually harm our ability to live our own life in concert with others by giving rise to certain kinds of moral blackmail. Suppose I have no objection to being vaccinated and a high personal risk tolerance. As such, I insist that unless you pay me one hundred dollars I will not go and get a vaccine. If your duties of justice meant that as long as I forgo the vaccine, you cannot return to pre-pandemic activities, then I would be able to hold your actions hostage by means of your duty of justice.

Justice, of course, is not the only virtue. I also have duties of charity. And indeed, one of the things that makes charity so demanding is precisely that it opens us up to this kind of moral blackmail. To love another person requires caring about even their self-made misery. Charity is not ultimately about living your own life; it demands instead that you live, at least in part, for others. This is why charity is such a high and holy virtue; and in turn why even if everyone who forgoes a vaccination does so for entirely voluntary reasons, that does not end all duties of precaution.

Conclusion

Of course, in real life things are a little more complicated. For example, some people are forgoing the vaccine for trivial reasons while others seem to have reasonable concerns. Does my duty of justice change depending on why others are not being vaccinated? That will be the topic of Part II.

Continue to Part II – “Types of Reasons”

April 21, 2020December 14, 2022

COVID-19 and the Ethics of Belief

photograph of scientist with mask and gloves looking through microscope

The current COVID-19 pandemic will likely have long-term effects that will be difficult to predict. This has certainly been the case with past pandemics. For example, the Black Death may have left a lasting mark on the human genome. Because of variations in human genetics, some people have genes which provide an immunological advantage to certain kinds of diseases. During the Black Death, those who had such genes were more likely to live and those without were more likely to do die. For example, a study of Rroma people, whose ancestors migrated to Europe from India one thousand years ago, revealed that those who migrated to Europe possessed genetic differences from their Indian ancestors that were relevant to the immune system response to Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes the Black Death. It’s possible that COVID-19 could lead to similar kinds of long-term effects. Are there moral conclusions that we can draw from this?

By itself, not really. Despite this being an example of natural selection at work, the fact that certain people are more likely to survive certain selection pressures than others does not indicate any kind of moral superiority. However, one moral lesson that we could take away is a willingness to make sure that our beliefs are well adapted to our environment. For example, a certain gene is neither good or bad in itself but becomes good or bad through the biochemical interactions within the organism in its environment. Genes that promote survival demonstrate their value to us by being put to (or being capable of being put to) the test of environmental conditions. In the time of COVID-19 one moral lesson the public at large should learn is to avoid wishful thinking and to demonstrate the fitness of our beliefs by putting them to empirical testing. The beliefs that are empirically successful are the beliefs that should carry on and be adopted.

For example, despite the complaints and resistance to social distancing, the idea has begun to demonstrate its value by being put to the test. This week the U.S. revised its model of projected deaths down from a minimum of 100,000 to 60,000 with the changes being credited to social distancing. In Canada, similar signs suggest that social distancing is “flattening the curve” and reducing the number of infections and thus reducing the strain on the healthcare system. On the other hand, stress, fear, and panic may lead us to accept ideas that are encouraging but not tested.

This is why it isn’t a good idea to look to “easy” solutions like hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19. As Dr. Fauci has noted, there is no empirical evidence that the drug is effective at treating it. While there are reports of some success, these are merely anecdotal. He notes, “There have been cases that show there may be an effect and there are others to show there’s no effect.” Any benefits the drug may possess are mitigated by a number of factors that are not known. Variations among the population may exist and so need to be controlled for in a clinical study. Just as certain genes may only be beneficial under certain environing conditions, the same may be true of beliefs. An idea may seem positive or beneficial, but that may only be under certain conditions. Ideas and beliefs need to be tested under different conditions to see whether they hold up. While studies are being conducted on hydroxychloroquine, they are not finished.

Relying on wishful thinking instead can be dangerous. The president has claimed that he downplayed the virus at first because he wanted to be “America’s cheerleader,” but being optimistic or hopeful without seriously considering what one is up against, or by ignoring the warning signs, is a recipe for failure. The optimism that an outbreak wouldn’t occur delayed government action to engage in social distancing measures in Italy and in the U.S. and as a result thousands may die who may not have had the matter been treated more seriously sooner.

As a corollary from the last point, we need to get better at relying on experts. But we need to be clear about who has expertise and why? These are people who possess years of experience studying, researching, and investigating ideas in their field to determine which ones hold up to scrutiny and which ones fail. They may not always agree, but this is often owing to disagreements over assumptions that go into the model or because different models may not be measuring exactly the same thing. This kind of disagreement is okay, however, because anyone is theoretically capable of examining their assumptions and holding them up to critical scrutiny.

But why do the projections keep changing? Haven’t they been wrong? How can we rely on them? The answer is that the projections change as we learn more data. But this far preferable to believing the same thing regardless of changing findings. It may not be as comforting getting a single specific unchanging answer, but these are still the only ideas that have been informed by empirical testing. Even if an expert is proven wrong, the field can still learn from those mistakes and improve their conclusions.

But it is also important to recognize that non-medical experts cannot give expert medical advice. Even having a Ph.D. in economics does not qualify Peter Navarro to give advice relating to medicine, biochemistry, virology, epidemiology, or public health policy. Only having years of experience in that field will allow you to consider the relevant information necessary for solving technical problems and putting forward solutions best suited to survive the empirical test.

Perhaps we have seen evidence that a broad shift in thinking has already occurred. There are estimates that a vaccine could be six months to a year away. Polling has shown a decrease in the number of people who would question the safety of vaccines. So perhaps the relative success of ending the pandemic will inspire new trust in expert opinion. Or, maybe people are just scared and will later rationalize it.

Adopting the habit of putting our beliefs to the empirical test, the moral consequences of which are very serious right now, is going to be needed sooner rather than later. If and when a vaccine comes along for COVID-19, the anti-vaccination debate may magnify. And, once the COVID-19 situation settles, climate change is still an ongoing issue that could cause future pandemics. Trusting empirically-tested theories and expert testimony more, and relying less on hearsay, rumor, and fake news could be one of the most important moral decisions we make moving forward.