CORONAVIRUS CRISIS: A QUEST FOR MORAL INSIGHT
Written by Cauan Marques Negreiros.
The current problematic situation concerning COVID-19 has achieved levels which had never been seen before, whether in the field of Public Health, Economics or even Politics. In effect, one could say that such an outrageous phenomenon would only be possible in a highly connected and globalized world as the one of nowadays. Insofar this connection is what makes our fight against Coronavirus even possible ─ advantages such as the evolution of the means of communications and, in particular, of internet made possible to perpetuate the economic activity, yet dangerously impaired, of the whole world within generalized scenarios of lockdown, which would be certainly impossible thirty years ago ─, it must be spoken as well that the severity of this disease is itself a sub-product of globalization. Thus, although the world would not be prepared to deal with such chaos many years ago, it is reasonable that no disease would achieve such level of damage and concern whatsoever.
As a matter of fact, Coronavirus is not merely a medical problem. Pandemics have been fairly studied and experienced during the last century at least; human medicine has boldly prepared for situations like these and, up to a high level of sureness, it knows how to handle theoretically with this scenario. However, we are not dealing with a theoretical case, so there is a lot of other variables to take into account. In fact, it’s quite clear that the difficulty of solving COVID’s crisis is much more related to social issues than with medical inability; on the contrary, in the countries in which the measures prescribed by the World Health Organization (WHO) are being applied, the rate of deaths has decreased and the problem is getting manageable, which proves the efficiency of the medical efforts that are being made. In either case, the Coronavirus problematic is much more than “just” a disease, it involves an eventual economic crisis, social and political issues, and a possible rearrangement of the current economic doctrine, namely neoliberalism. Among all of those faces of the problem we are living in, we must committedly and sincerely look for a feasible, sustainable and ethical measure of resolution.
Well, my goal here is to approach the last condition of resolution: what is the right thing to do in this situation? I will present different moral perspectives of questions such as “obligatory lockdown”, “Market freeze” and “General welfare x individual liberty”. I do not intend to be explicitly partial, so I will make clear assumptions that do not leads us directly to any specific answer, in such a way that I will not present my own opinion upon the problem. Nevertheless, I will not use of factual economic considerations; for that would possibly conceal our moral investigations, which I propose as the fundamental role of this analysis. That way, in despite of the actual complexity of our situation, for we do have to consider many other factors to prove our hypotheses and hence validate our conclusions, we will consider purely the moral question that lies within this crisis.
- LIVES X ECONOMY?
First of all, it is necessary to elucidate an initial aspect of this problem, which was widely confused as the problem itself. Many people have mistakenly assumed that the problem regarding the Market freeze was, directly, its effect on the world economy; however, this statement, in the way it was stated, is either wrong or incomplete, I think. For, by saying that some people could die in order to protect the Market is, even that subconsciously, to assume the Market as an intrinsic value of humanity such as life itself. The difference of an intrinsic value and an extrinsic value is related to why are those ends pursuit; for instance, it is said that happiness must be an intrinsic value, for no one wants happiness for something else, it suffices for itself; on the other hand, if we are talking about money, essentially, it has an extrinsic value, for no one truly wants money for itself ─ I will discuss this a little further ─, but only wants it to buy desired things or to achieve financial security, which would both lead, at least in theory, to happiness. One may argue, however, that money is actually pursuit intrinsically and there is a reason to think like that: many people abdicate from their free time or family comfort solely to pursue money and, sometimes, they really seem to choose money over happiness. Nonetheless, I think this is but an illusion, for people got so much attached to the means whereby their ends are pursuit that they often resort to an “endification” of the means. People want so much to be happy, and money is so appealing as a right path to it, that they start to look for money as it was happiness itself; but, if we picture these people in a desert having to decide between money and water, this appearance will suddenly fade out.
Given the above, I believe that the same applies to Economy, namely, it is actually a means for something else, a truer intrinsic value. The problem with that is the fact that the wealth of a nation usually represents the wealth of a part of it, at least an enoughly large number of people that contains it. Nonetheless, economy sometimes do not represent the true welfare of the people of a country, nor even the level of liberty they have in there. Thus, I really do not think that someone would really take the position of saying that economy is good even when it does not represent some major value in a nation, so the whole question “either the lives or the economy” makes no sense at all; for you are considering an end and a means, which is, by definition, less important than the end it causes. Then, in order to correctly reformulate this question, we need to look for the actual end of economy and that is the real question behind all of those debates. The problem is people got so mesmerized with economy as a perfect means for what they have originally intended to pursue that they do not even remember what it was, if it really have had any actual end whatsoever; for we were not the inventors of economy, we just kept a project based upon ideals that most of us do not even comprehend.
- WELFARE X LIBERTY
We could consider many and many different economic doctrines, for they are certainly plenty; however, most of them is either purely theoretical or defined by its methods of effectiveness instead of the ethical principles which should guide them. In fact, if we consider solely the economic doctrines that are grounded upon a philosophically rigorous moral system, our list will become much shorter. Some major values that often take place into those discussions are: equality, liberty and welfare. Insofar as I am concerned with possible courses of actions towards the Coronavirus situation, and since equality usually happens as a complement embedded into economic theories, but not as the sole core of them, in especial for capitalism, I intend to deal mostly with the concepts of freedom and general happiness; although topics on equality will arguably appear in these analyses. So, on one hand, we have neoliberalism, which, since the 70’s, has been the major economic doctrine of the core countries and is fundamentally based on libertarianism; and, on the other hand, we do have welfare State and Keynesianism, which was the economic basis for the New Deal – series of programs implemented by the president Franklin D. Roosevelt during the years that followed the Great Depression – and has some important similarities with Utilitarianism. Nonetheless, I am not saying that these doctrines are the same thing of these moral systems, they are not. Neoliberalism will not obey blindly and faithfully to libertarianism, and neither will Keynesianism to utilitarianism; since those are economic theories, they must take many non-ethical principles into account. However, once again, since my concern here is solely ethical, I will approach their philosophical basis rather than their economic interpretations; for I intend to raise this critique further I can, avoiding practical issues that could difficult our thoughts. So the right thing to do might have to do with keeping our economic activity, but it might not. This analysis does exists for the sake of ethic and morality, which I think is essential not only for this particular moment, but also to all life in society, although it does not suffice alone against this crisis.
2.1 SELF-OWNERSHIP
Let us start by understanding what is libertarianism, or at least its right-wing version, since it is not restricted to this political spectrum. Well, one can say that the prior value in libertarianism is, indeed, liberty, but what does one understands by “liberty”? Actually, the conception of liberty does not admit such a consensual unique version of itself; in fact, in his paper Two Concepts of Liberty (1969), part of the book Four Essays On liberty, the Lativian-British philosopher Isaiah Berlin discuss two main kinds of freedom, which would answer two different, although partially convergent, questions. In this scenario, we could place libertarianism as advocating for the “negative” conception of freedom; namely, the one that concerns with the answer for the question: “What is the area within which the subject–a person or group of persons–is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be, without interference by other persons?” (BERLIN, 1969). Thus, libertarianism would claim for the absence of interference from other agents in one’s actions. In effect, this notion of libertarianism – often called “spencerian libertarianism” in reference to Herbert Spencer – gives us a good clue of what it is the truly essence of it and, in despite of being outdated, a great portion of the people who label themselves as libertarians still support this conception.
However, five years later than this perceptive observation by Berlin, the Harvard professor and philosopher Robert Nozick published Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974), which was a libertarian response to John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice (1971). In his book, Nozick restructured libertarianism, focusing thereby not in this mere conception of negative freedom, but in a far more unique and systematic idea of self-ownership. Nevertheless, one must not confuse his idea of self-ownership with the conception of positive freedom. The latter does have to do with being your own master, controlling your actions and not being controlled by them, being a subject instead of an object, but it also presupposes that it might exist a “higher” nature of yourself, an autonomous part of your consciousness that have the right – or even the duty – to discipline and control your “lower” nature, even against your apparent will; for instance, we can think in Kantian ethics and in stoicism. Kant thought we could only be truly free if we got rid of our empirical, accidental desires and look for categorical and universal courses of action, reaching out to a rational subject inside ourselves; whereas the stoics used to cultivate ethics of authority and austerity against desire, avoiding pleasure not mattering how much we think we wanted it, reaching out, then, to a virtuous subject inside ourselves. The former, on the other hand, do not presuppose this “wise-subject-within” and do not recognize this sort of tutoring of finding your truer will as right; only the individual themselves can know what is the best for them and no one else, not even a supposedly more enlightened version of themselves.
Nozick’s idea of self-ownership starts with the acknowledgement that people have a stringent set of rights towards themselves, the same kind of rights one have over their possesses. By saying that someone owns himself, one is claiming rights such as: a) the right to control your own body, either by the liberty of using it as you please or by the claim-right of demanding others to not use it without your consent, b) rights to trade these rights with other people (by sale, rental, gift or loan), c) immunities to the non-consensual loss of these rights, d) redress rights in case of non-consensual use of your entity and e) enforcement rights (e.g. rights to restrain persons about to violate your rights or the rights of a third person).
I think there are two major reasons why such an idea is so appealing: first of all, because their bases happen rather natural to most of us, we do not feel like they are arbitrary or biased; in fact, non-consented actions tend to incite our moral sentiments even when the action itself does not present anything truly impermissible or immoral, like rape; unless you are tremendously conservative or religiously committed to a sort of dogma that precludes sex inexorably – outside marriage, since no reasonable creed would avoid entirely something that is essential for human reproduction --, you will not consider casual sexual intercourse as more than unsuggestable, then why rape, which is basically the same activity, is such a horrendous crime? This remarks how morally meaningful consent is to us. Obviously we have to admit that, in most cases, rape is embedded with violence and aggression, but even that hypothetically the physical pain of the victim was the same of the pain they would feel in a regular sexual activity, it would still be a horrendous crime. Secondly, I think it is appealing because it deals very well with the priority problem, at least we are attempted to think this so far, one does not have to decide which values they should prior or how they should weight different values, because we already have that set of rights to guide our actions, then, the theory does not need to rely upon intuitionism. For example we have homosexuality, in sake of coherency, most libertarians, at least the serious ones, support the idea that people can do whatever they enjoy if not violating those rights; thus, if two – or more – men or women consent in engaging into any type of relationship without attacking the rights of a third person, they would be free to do so. Analogously, we have the libertarian defense of abortion, which considers the fetus as a part of the woman’s body, what would give to her rights over it; of course, we do have libertarians that might acknowledge the fetus itself as a person of rights and hence, claiming abortion is immoral, but there is a point in recognizing that some of them do not think like that. Although libertarianism, in this form I am presenting, is labeled as “right-wing”, one might notice that some of them defend very leftist opinions, which, once again, enforces the idea that its principles are not biased.
For a libertarian, what would it be Economy’s end? Well, according to libertarianism, free market is the manifestation of human liberty itself, that’s why it condemns interventions or politics of redistributive justice; for it does not care with eventual configurations of the economy, but only with the procedure which must be followed to achieve it. Libertarianism is a pure procedural justice, because the justice for it is actually in the monetary trade and not in the distribution of the money. To give a good example, let us look to the Wilt Chamberlain Argument, as presented by Nozick:
Now suppose that Wilt Chamberlain is greatly in demand by basketball teams, being a great gate attraction. (Also suppose Contracts run only for a year, with players being free agents.) He signs the following sort of contract with a team: In each home game, twenty-five cents from the price of each ticket of admission goes to him. (We ignore the question of whether he is “gouging” the owners, letting them look out for themselves.) The season starts, and people cheerfully attend his team’s games; they buy their tickets, each time dropping a separate twenty-five cents of their admission price into a special box with Chamberlain’s name on it. They are excited about seeing him play; it is worth the total admission price to them. Let us suppose that in one season one million persons attend his home games, and Wilt Chamberlain winds up with $250,000, a much larger sum than the average income and larger even than anyone else has. Is he entitled to this income? Is this new distribution D2, unjust? If so, why? There is no question about whether each of the people was entitled to the control over the resources they held in D1; because that was the distribution (your favorite) that (for the purposes of argument) we assumed was acceptable. Each of these persons chose to give twenty-five cents of their money to Chamberlain. They could have spent it on going to the movies, or on candy bars, or on copies of Dissent magazine, or of Monthly Review. But they all, at least one million of them, converged on giving it to Wilt Chamberlain in exchange for watching him play basketball. If D1 was a just distribution, and people voluntarily moved from it to D2, transferring parts of their shares they were given under D1 (what was it for if not to do something with?), isn’t D2 also just?
(NOZICK, 1974)
So D1 is the initial configuration of distribution of wealth that we can adjust as we please until make it acceptable; we can literally start with a utopic equalitarian society and then proceed, as he describe in the passage, towards this new configuration of distribution of wealth D2. He claims that, considering the transition between the two scenarios as entirely due to consensual exchanges, we would achieve a new configuration radically different, which could certainly be called unjust by equalitarians, but nothing immoral truly happened in the middle. That’s what is meant by pure procedural justice. The same would apply to economy; that’s why it doesn’t matter for libertarians that, in 2015, 1% of humankind concentrated half of the wealth of the world, if such configuration was achieved by the means of free market – which is not necessarily true --, it would be just still.
Now, let us see how this relates to the coronavirus crisis. Firstly, they claim that obligatory lockdown would be a crime against individual liberty; they believe that neither the State nor anyone else could force an individual to do something or not to do something against their will even that it might cause their deaths. However, we need to separate things, some libertarians defend a more light version of self-ownership, while others defend a version of full self-ownership. Even though, the latter is more consistent and deals better with the priority problem, it might leads us to some counterintuitive conclusions. According to the full self-ownership idea, one could sell their organs for pure entertainment or sell themselves as slaves. In effect, both of these ideas are very repulsive and appalling to our moral sentiments, but they are natural conclusion that follow from the principle of full self-ownership. Nevertheless, if we take back the aforementioned commentary on unpainful rape, we can now discuss the converse, consensual violent sexual practices; once again, that’s something very divisible, even among libertarians. That’s the first reason why some libertarians would agree with the lockdown. However, the idea of freezing the market or intervening upon it through the State is a little more complicated to give in for a libertarian; for attacking the procedure would be attacking all the human justice. Obviously, since it is an emergency time, maybe some of them would partially agree with it.
The second reason why some libertarians would agree with the lockdown has to do with something I have not told yet. Actually libertarianism does not deal so perfectly with the priority problem, because there is quite a difference between the sphere of action of a person and the sphere of protection against other’s actions towards that same person; in such a way, that they are actually reciprocally inverses, when you increase the size of your sphere of action, you decrease the size of your sphere of protection, and vice-versa. Consequently, by increasing your sphere of free action when walking unconcernedly in the streets during a pandemic, you are decreasing the sphere of protection of the other people against your actions without their consent. Therefore, even that you might not be wrong by risking your own life, at least from the libertarian standpoint, you would be wrong by risking the lives of others without their consent.
What we noticed this far is that the fact you are a libertarian does not mean you will be against lockdown, but it will not mean the converse as well. You should still balance all of those things, which is only possible through research; you can only know whether the hypothesis “If I went outside, I will be risking the lives of other people” is true if you search for it. So, after all, liberty is not the only thing to take into account and, as we presupposed, we cannot achieve a course action solely through morals.
2.2 PRINCIPLES OF UTILITY
Now, let us take a look at a different moral perspective, one that primes not for individual liberty, but for utility. There are, of course, many variants of utilitarianism, in especial the versions of it that have been developed recently, so which one are we going to choose? The main idea I would like to debate here is the one of consequentialism; for it presents a clear and meaningful role in the quest for moral justification either for obligatory lockdown or for no form of lockdown whatsoever; so, in order to clarify that, a look over Jeremy Bentham and Stuart Mill’s philosophies may suffice. Nonetheless, I still need to formalize our discussion in terms of what is pursuit and in which way this theory is somehow appealing for some of us. Then, following the path of John Rawls (1971), I will look for the strict classical doctrine of utilitarianism as presented by Henry Sidgwick.
First of all, what is utility? The philosophical signification for this term has some important differences from its colloquial meaning and, as we may see further, leads to completely distinct conclusions. Outside the academic world, people often use utilitarianism and pragmatism as the same thing; for they think in utility as convenience, namely, as something that would be advantageous for a person even that it might be disadvantageous for the other persons involved. However, such a notion do not correspond with the philosophical conception of utility. As a matter of fact, utility means nothing more than happiness; not the happiness of a single individual, but for an entire group of consideration, which most utilitarians consider to be the group of all sentient beings in the universe. For a utilitarian, good actions are good insofar they tend to maximize the net balance of happiness in the universe, or minimize the unhappiness; and bad actions are bad insofar they maximize the unhappiness or minimize happiness (MILL, 1861). It is remarkable how satisfactory and clear this definition is for a person seeing it for the first time, that is probably the first appeal of the theory, or at least we think so until we realize that we do not what does it means “happiness” and “unhappiness”, and, even that we knew it, we do not know how to quantify it.
Let us start by the most natural solution for this problem, happiness is but pleasure or absence of pain; whereas unhappiness is pain or absence of pleasure. That’s what happened for both Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, and no one can deny that this idea of happiness as pleasure is quite intuitive and do present a certain appeal in its accordance with the simplicity of utilitarianism itself. A clear conception of happiness for a clear moral system. Notwithstanding, Bentham, in especial, not only simplify the conception of happiness, but also simplify the idea of “maximization”; he claims that the level of pleasure or pain of an individual can be mathematically and accurately quantified, only by taking into account its absolute duration (SANDLE, 2008). Well, there are still some researchers that try to prove the existence of a perfect method of quantification for pleasures and pains, but they are certainly minority in nowadays. Instead, we may understand this process of quantification through experience, constantly learning what kind of action tend to increase or decrease utility; thus the own utility of an action would be debatable, which sounds more attractive – the excessive simplicity of Bentham’s theory often presents some aspects of childishness --; a great representative for this conception of quantification is Stuart Mill, in the second chapter of his Utilitarianism, he claims:
Again, defenders of utility often find themselves called upon to reply to such objections as this—that there is not time, previous to action, for calculating and weighing the effects of any line of conduct on the general happiness. This is exactly as if any one were to say that it is impossible to guide our conduct by Christianity, because there is not time, on every occasion on which anything has to be done, to read through the Old and New Testaments. The answer to the objection is, that there has been ample time, namely, the whole past duration of the human species. During all that time, mankind have been learning by experience the tendencies of actions; on which experience all the prudence, as well as all the morality of life, are dependent. People talk as if the commencement of this course of experience had hitherto been put off, and as if, at the moment when some man feels tempted to meddle with the property or life of another, he had to begin considering for the first time whether murder and theft are injurious to human happiness. Even then I do not think that he would find the question very puzzling […]That philosophers might easily do this, even now, on many subjects; that the received code of ethics is by no means of divine right; and that mankind have still much to learn as to the effects of actions on the general happiness, I admit, or rather, earnestly maintain. The corollaries from the principle of utility, like the precepts of every practical art, admit of indefinite improvement, and, in a progressive state of the human mind, their improvement is perpetually going on.
(MILL, 1861)
As Mill very respectfully defend in this passage, utilitarianism is not about attributing actually measurable unities of pain and pleasure; but rather about using the collective moral knowledge of humankind, acquired so far, as a basis for the construction of methods towards the best paths to happiness. This collective knowledge not only belongs to the ancient ones, but it is also reformulated and improved by the new ones, in a perpetual inquiry for best ways whereby happiness can be pursuit. Furthermore, Mill also expand the role of pursuing general happiness to the own institutions of the State; for, according to him, all the society should be organized aiming the maximization of utility and that would only be possible in a society in which the happiness of a particular individual were so attached to that of any other, that he would feel any sort of harm as if it was committed against himself. Nevertheless, even though Mill still considers himself a hedonistic, his idea of happiness overpass the usual conception of pleasure. To start with, he stands for different kinds of pleasure and pain, not in intensity, but in species. According to him, between two sorts of pleasures, the best one is that which the majority of people, having felt both of them – and enjoyed both of them –, would prefer over the other. Following this procedure, Mill asserts that the pleasures of the intellect are superior to that of the body; however, a great portion of humankind would certainly prefer corporal pleasures over pleasures of the intellect – just consider to ask people if they would rather to have sex or to eat pizza or to watch TV shows, or to read a dense and informative book! --, then why Mill defends this idea? Well, according to him, you cannot make this question to everyone; for the condition is not only to do the activity alone, but to feel some kind of pleasure by doing it; most of the people would rather the corporal pleasures over the intellectual ones, for they were no longer able to really felt pleased by intellectual activities. But, once again, this might be questioned, because even if you ask to people that occasionally read books and do take some relief from doing so, a great part of them will still rather corporal pleasures. Maybe, what Mill means by better pleasures are actually the ones that do not preclude you from feeling pleased by other ones; for the practices of intellectual activities, such as studying and reading books, seldom prevent you from the pleasures of the body, and often help you to balance those practices in order to make them more pleasant; whereas, the practices of corporal activities are more likely to prevent you from the other pleasures. Most of the wise men can still feel pleased by corporal activities, while most of the men that dedicate their lives to corporal pleasures – which represents the greater part of humankind – cannot feel pleased by studying and reading books. In despite of not being wrong in his finding, many philosophers support that Mill’s explanation for it is purely elitist (SANDLE, 2008) by considering intellectual activities as the same of “high culture” activities and claim that most of this people that “only looks for corporal pleasures” would, in fact, be pleased for intellectual activities if they had access to them and were encouraged to perform them.
Putting the hedonistic part of Mill’s theory aside, we can look to another of his statements, this one from his On Liberty (1859), when he presents a very meaningful conception of utility:
It is proper to state that I forego any advantage which could be derived to my argument from the idea of abstract right, as a thing independent of utility. I regard utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions; but it must be utility in the largest sense, grounded on the permanent interests of a man as a progressive being. Those interests, I contend, authorise the subjection of individual spontaneity to external control, only in respect to those actions of each, which concern the interest of other people.
(MILL, 1859)
The first important element of this statement is the fact that it confirms that Mill is not entirely hedonistic, for he places utility in a somewhat different role, in what we could call “modern pleasures” of humanity. The concept of progress is strictly attached to the one of modernity, what explains very satisfactorily why intellectual pleasure is undoubtedly, at least for Mill, better than corporal pleasures. The powers of mind are much more linked to modernity than the powers of the body, which, in fact, are widely disparaged by modern thinkers. Either way, this conception is a little similar to the one of Sidgwick.
However, whereas Mill starts in the individual and then goes to the institutions; Sidgwick, more systematically, starts with the institutions and then proceeds to the role of the individuals. Rawls, in his own analysis for the utilitarianism, summarize Sidgwick’s idea of it as the follow: “the main idea is that society is rightly ordered, and therefore just, when its major institutions are arranged so as to achieve the greatest net balance of satisfaction summed over all the individuals belonging to it.” (RAWLS, 1971) By satisfaction, one can understand the fulfillment of rational desires or expectations. When Sidgwick puts the whole idea of utility into the supposed result of the good-working of the institutions of the State, he presents a more public and general solution for the problem of quantification; for, we do can analyses when the claim-rights of individuals are being legitimately attended. Further, he also returns with the equality among the different kinds of rational desires. His utilitarianism is solidly what one can call a Teleological theory, for it does not make distinction between good and right. Satisfaction is said to be the sole good than it must be pursuit independently of whether this form of satisfaction is right. In effect, utilitarianism do not judge the desires of the individuals – so as the libertarianism --, it just states that all of them are equally worthy and have the same right of being pursuit.
What would it be then the reason why utilitarianism is such an appealing theory? First of all, because we can imagine the choices of the State as being the collective and impartial choices of every citizen. Each one of us can decide how we will distribute our satisfactions over our lifetime, so everyone agrees it is right to accept some unpleasant situations during the beginning of your life in order to achieve a higher quality of life afterwards. Also, the choice for looking for the maximum net balance of satisfaction in one’s life sounds more than reasonable, it sounds natural; no one would freely choose to live a worse life – or what they consider to be worse – if not for a good reason. People always try to advance their own good, when others are not affected, and approximate to their rational ends. Then why not to expand this idea for the State as a whole? Since the well-being of a society comes from the collective fulfilment of the many desires of the many individuals that composes it, the same way people balance future and past gains with future and past losses, society may balance satisfactions and dissatisfactions between different individuals. “The principle of choice for an association of men is interpreted as an extension of the principle of choice for one man.” (Rawls, 1971)
Secondly, on the contrary of the libertarian system, which we can understand as being egoistic, for it supports the individual liberty of others solely, and insofar, it advances one’s personal individual liberty, utilitarianism is highly altruistic. Since our society cultivate charity and beneficence as unquestionable virtues, and utilitarianism takes this idea to other level by institutionalizing the concern with other’s satisfactions. Thirdly, and that’s a very decisive point, utilitarianism is appealing for it presents the most simple solution for the priority problem. The net balance of the individuals is all that matters, not their distribution, nor the kind of satisfaction that this society is cultivating. Differently from the libertarianism, utilitarianism really find a “perfect solution” for the priority problem and, according to almost all of the utilitarians, the only possible solution. According to them, no other end could take the position of supreme maxim for human morality and, thereby, would sink into arbitrary intuitionism.
Therefore, we can see that for the utilitarians, since they do not believe in individual and inalienable rights – which they only support for the political experience revealed that the establishment of individual rights tend to increase the satisfaction of the individuals, while the absence of them tend to decrease it --, obligatory lockdown should be putted in work even that it might constrain the individual liberty of the individuals, for the welfare of society would be prior to the individual liberties of the individuals that compose it. On the other hand, if it was confirmed that the losses of satisfactions caused by the deaths of people during the pandemic -- if no measure were established -- was going to be inferior to the consequent losses of satisfactions during the economic crash that would follow the freeze of the market, many strict and orthodox utilitarians would not be afraid in asserting that the deaths would be justifiable.
Of course, not all of them would think so. Stuart Mill himself speaks that any moral theory must be open to the agent to take into account the particular circumstances they are living in and to act accordingly. Some of them, otherwise, look for a different kind of principle of utility, the so-called average principle, which claims that what must to maximized is not the absolute net balance of satisfaction, but actually the average net balance of satisfaction for each individual. Sidgwick denied this idea for it was not very compatible with the idea of a sympathetic impartial spectator, which is an important element of the classic view of utilitarianism:
Consider the following definition reminiscent of Hume and Adam Smith. Something is said right, a social system say, when an ideally rational and impartial spectator would approve of it from a general point of view should he possess all the relevant knowledge of the circumstances. A rightly ordered society is one meeting the approval of such an ideal observer.
(Rawls, 1971)
In the first place, we can observe so far the fact that utilitarianism does not truly consider individuals as individuals, what is often considered to be its great flaw by people that do not understand it, namely, that it is an individualistic doctrine, is actually the opposite of its real flaw, or what most people would call so. Utilitarianism do not respect individuals as human beings, for it mistakenly assumes that impartiality is the same of impersonality. Instead of not priming for any individual over another, it abandons all of them as if they were not people at all. In the second place, most people feel profoundly offended by its thesis on the inexistence of inalienable rights, we commonly use to believe that some elements like human life, political liberty and freedom of speech cannot be override even for the welfare of the society as a whole.
Once again, we do not achieved any form of undoubtedly resolution for the question of whether we ought or ought not to obey quarantine. Therefore, it might be a possibility that the resolution of this question based upon a single value such as liberty or satisfaction is impossible.
- FINAL CONSIDERATIONS
In this paper, we elaborated a series of moral investigations and explanations upon the scenario of the Coronavirus crisis. Yet, it does not intend to be a guide for anyone, the conclusions of such analysis are purposefully aporetics, for its main intention is to criticize moral theories that have often guided people that do not even knew what they were fighting for. I expect this to serve as path of humility for those that do not admit the flaws of their own opinions. Only by admitting the mistakes you commit, you can try to correct than. To attack libertarianism is not to say individual liberty is not important, the same way to attack utilitarianism is not to say satisfaction is not important; criticize those theories is to recognize the existence of other elements that must be pondered in order to take a good course of action, whether towards yourself or towards the whole society during an emergency time.
BIBLIOGRAPHY AND LIST OF REFERENCES
- BERLIN, Isaiah. Two Concepts of Liberty (1969)
- MILL, John S. On Liberty (1859)
- _____ Utilitarianism (1861)
- NOZICK, Robert. Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974)
- RAWLS, John. A Theory of Justice (1971)
- SANDEL, Michael J. Justice: what’s the right thing to do? (2008)
- VAN DER VOSSEN, Bas, "Libertarianism", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2019 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2019/entries/libertarianism/>.
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