How should we reimagine the legal and moral implications of a world with coronavirus?
We all talk about what happens when its over but it's far from certain it will ever be over. So do we assess it like we assess cancer - and allow people to make their own choices about what they will abstain from to reduce their own risk of contracting it?
Of course the 'cancer' analogy breaks down because you can't give others cancer. So personal appetite for risk can't be the only guiding legal or moral principle. Morality and the law must operate to protect others from your choices: which, let us not forget, can kill them.
So is it better to compare it with drink driving? You might accept an enhanced risk to your own life but, whatever that assessment, it is wrong for you to endanger the lives of others. After all, you have that choice but they do not.
In assessing the weight of the moral or legal wrong of drink driving, your degree of recklessness to the risk you pose to others is relevant, right? And if you don't know you have coronavirus, perhaps you aren't being that reckless? Even driving sober poses some risk to others.
But, if you know you have coronavirus, and you expose others to a meaningful risk of death, that must surely cross the legal and moral line, wherever you choose to draw that line.
Anyway. Something to reflect on for those of us attacking and defending Neil Ferguson and Dominic Cummings.
