A specious abstraction.The future lives you hypothesise won't be exactly as you imagine if gmnts open up all restrictions; a society that allows certain 1000s die now to prevent possible hypothesised future deaths changes its cultural character. Those future lives also change.
A society that witnesses thousands being allowed to sicken and die, with mass graves and overflowing temporary morgues and where preventable deaths are not prevented, becomes something other than the society that applies all resources to heal the sick. 
A society with that cultural memory of cruel cold economics prevailing, may actually face greater anomie, greater depression and more suicides and violence as a result, than one that retained compassion for the immediately sick, regardless of their "chances" of recovery.
Any society is contingent on the mutually reassuring life-experience of its members. Right now, we are cheering health workers and enduring lockdowns, sacrificing something because of an abstract ideal that to be human we must care for the sick...
and prevent others from sickening. This is the touchstone of modernity, evolving into secular form from the charitable institutions of medieval hospitals, where monks and nuns tended the sick and poor -echoing the parable of the Good Samaritan.
The pagan Romans and Greeks, for all their high culture, cared surprisingly little about those not immediately related to them. In contrast the Florentine renaissance patrons of the arts, cruel and ruthless merchants as they were,
also competed to build charity hospitals for the poor. We have inherited that charitable impulse. The national health schemes of the post-war, all welfare and social security, humanitarian global aid, and the human rights charter of the UN all reflect that impulse.
Politics has also demonstrated the collective responsibility. Even the most ardent neoliberals, (well, mostly) have provisionally abandoned austerity and privatisation for the application of the legal instruments of the state to act for the good of all.
This is approved by the majority of citizens, who at some deeper level won't abandon strangers. At this moment, economic theorists, suggesting an alternative social emotion should prevail, are outliers, and should remain so.
@threadreaderapp unroll please.
