I know they think they're being realists, but I wonder how many "better to let this happen" folks have truly pictured hundreds of thousands slowly suffocating to death — "like having glass in your lungs," said one patient — knowing no one will help them, that society chose this.
Of course we make tradeoffs of $ vs. life all the time. But what's at stake is not some entries on an Excel spreadsheet. It's telling *mass populations to go to horrible, preventable deaths.* The specifics of this illness and the moral gravity of this choice have not sunk in.
Skeptics are right in a sense: There clearly *are* outbreaks small enough — say, a bad flu season — to be obviously not worth an economic shutdown to avoid, even if that would save lives. (Sorry!)
But is there no line? Would we not do a shutdown to stop, say, a new Black Death?
But is there no line? Would we not do a shutdown to stop, say, a new Black Death?
Yuval Levin once wrote on the danger of placing health above all else: "By this logic, to stand in the way of the struggle for health, for whatever reason, is to become complicit in nature’s iniquity…Lives are at stake after all, and there is action we can take to protect them."
"But of course, the tragic fact is that the struggle for survival will always rage. People are always dying, and they always have been and always will be. If that means that there can never be a time for moralizing, then we are in trouble." thenewatlantis.com/publications/p…
The context in which Yuval wrote these lines was embryonic stem cell research. The fight against cancer, he suggested, should be understood in the context of enduring human limits — not as an emergency that justified destroying young human beings to save ourselves.
But look: sometimes an emergency really is an emergency. And a proper ordering of human goods is not a mass suicide pact.
Seeing that ordering of goods plainly, understanding how to apply it, knowing when one good is improperly elevated over another — all this requires the virtue of prudence, and attendance to the particularities of a situation. And it is good and just to smash false idols.
So where do we draw the line? If there is some level of pandemic bad enough to merit shuttering an economy to avert, what is it?
A very hard question — that mercifully we do not need to answer. Because the question we face is about *this particular pandemic in front of us now.*
A very hard question — that mercifully we do not need to answer. Because the question we face is about *this particular pandemic in front of us now.*
My core complaint against "don't let this stop our way of life" is not that it prioritizes the economy over life. There are cases where that is justified. It is that what I've seen *does not offer a serious argument that Covid-19 is one of those cases,* and doesn't really try to.
I don't see them reckoning with the full scope of what's predicted — not just the deaths but tens of millions gravely ill, health care system collapse, 2nd/3rd/4th order social and economic effects unimaginable — and doing a frank cost/benefit analysis that the shutdown is worse.
Nor do I see them reckon with the ethical fact that not all deaths weigh equally on society, with the gravity of forever knowing we permitted horrible death on a mass scale that we had options to avert.
This I believe is how we ought to read what Yuval's essay says for our moment: That when faced with two paths, part of what must weigh on us is whether down one we degrade ourselves to save what we cherish.
I will say plainly that the path of further shutdown also means pain and suffering that could be averted by choosing the other. There's no easy out. But there are policies to lessen it and end it. And down the other path lies ruin far greater — human, economic, moral.
I'll end with this: "They are essentially drowning in their own blood." propublica.org/article/a-medi…
In anticipation of some @'s: I completely agree that the current lockdown is indiscriminate and not sustainable for long. It's our only option for now, but must be replaced with a more targeted approach that allows the economy to begin restarting ASAP: thenewatlantis.com/publications/w…
"One day we will tell our grandchildren how we lived, how we loved, during the Great Pandemic. Let’s respect human life in such a way that we will not be ashamed to tell them the truth."
This from @drmoore strikes a good, non-absolutist balance: nytimes.com/2020/03/26/opi…
This from @drmoore strikes a good, non-absolutist balance: nytimes.com/2020/03/26/opi…
