With much of the world’s population under lockdown and medical experts saying it will be months before the coronavirus pandemic abates, Donald Trump had other ideas. Last week Trump, echoing Fox News personalities, began publicly speculating that the US economy could be re-opened for an Easter miracle, then barely three weeks away. “We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself,” said the president, who later speculated that opposition to re-opening the economy was motivated by “certain people that would like it to do financially poorly, because they think that would be very good as far as defeating me at the polls”. Almost immediately, public health experts warned that a premature end to social distancing would send infection rates soaring catastrophically, the opposite of flattening the curve. Dr Anthony Fauci, the government’s own leading infectious disease expert, dismissed the Easter deadline as “aspirational”, perhaps in the way that planning to learn fluent Korean in that time would be “aspirational”.
Yet talk of a swift end continued all week on the American right, and on the internet. The Lieutenant Governor of Texas told Fox News that he would be willing to sacrifice himself for the economic good of his grandchildren. Self-described “rationalists” swarmed Twitter to educate us on some basic statistics. The flu kills around 400,000 people around the world every year, yet we don’t shut down the global economy for that. Their point: given that we’re already willing to make trade offs with human lives, why should coronavirus be any different? Why not accept that some people, perhaps hundreds of thousands, will die, but treat that as the regrettable cost of a rational decision to save the economy?Like many, I found these ruminations abhorrent. It’s obviously horrible to value the economy over human lives. And yet the Twitter “rationalists” have a point. We already do that; we just aren’t honest about it. Right now America sacrifices almost 2,000 lives every year rather than slightly lower driving speeds. What is so different about this situation? What, other than squeamishness, explains the moral outrage at Trump’s rapid re-opening plan?
Well, there’s the obvious point: Trump’s maths are wrong. Ending the lockdown by Easter would not be good for the economy. It might bolster the stock market for a day or two, but the economic effects of additional millions of people debilitated by disease, caring for loved ones, or dying when the health care system collapses will certainly not enhance economic growth. The idea of rushing back to normal is childish fantasy.
So that explains why Trump’s plan is a bad idea. But that doesn’t explain the moral vehemence directed against it – the objection cannot be that Trump’s detailed economic models were a bit off. (Asked how he calculated the Easter deadline, Trump said “Look, Easter’s a very special day for me… I think Easter Sunday and you’ll have packed churches all over our country, I think it would be a beautiful time”.) Instead, much of the criticism seems to imply Trump’s plan would be immoral even if it really were possible to save the economy by sacrificing lives. As some critics put it, Trump seemed ready to let people die simply to protect the profits of his Wall Street cronies.
If there’s anything obvious in public ethics, it’s that abandoning the vulnerable to help the rich is just plain evil. Unfortunately, I think that’s a dangerously simplistic gloss on the current situation. The economic damage of pandemic lockdown is not small, and it is not targeted simply at Wall Street plutocrats. Last week the United States saw its highest unemployment spike in history, with more than 3 million new filings. Similar effects may appear across the corona-affected world. While emergency government spending can make up for some of the losses, it surely won’t protect everyone. And if shutdowns, in some form or other, continue for months, as many experts expect, even public financing will eventually be unable to keep ordinary people from bankruptcy.
I think we must admit this: the economic consequences of flattening the curve are morally weighty as well. Those of us with doable-at-home jobs are merely bored, but many others are scared, suffering and at risk of long term impoverishment from missed rent or medical debt. Think also of the many people trapped in lockdown with their domestic abusers. These are moral costs, not merely economic ones, and they will only mount as the months go on.
Still, many people will object to any weighing of costs and benefits when those costs are human lives. Underlying this objection is a very old worry about utilitarian ethics, going back to the times of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Utilitarianism demands that we choose the option with the best overall outcome, even if that means cruel treatment for some. Many people find this implication morally objectionable. In one infamous case, set out by the philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson, simple utilitarianism seems to imply that it is obligatory for a surgeon to chop up one perfectly healthy person in order to procure organs to save five others.
But while this kind of utilitarian thinking looks ugly on a small scale, it becomes much more plausible once the numbers get very large. Instead of a surgeon saving five people by killing one, consider this: suppose terrorists have credibly threatened to detonate a nuclear device hidden in a city of millions, unless we kill one innocent person. Now, suddenly, most people are grudgingly willing to compromise the absolute protection of each individual life. When the numbers get large enough, utilitarian calculation seems much less objectionable.
In public health policy, the numbers are almost always very large. It is no surprise that epidemiologists often think in implicitly utilitarian ways, given that much of their work uses abstracted numerical models rather than contact with flesh and blood individuals. And for the most part, it’s probably good that things are this way. If utilitarian thinking is appealing to many of us when the numbers grow large enough, we probably want public health policy to be made by people who aren’t squeamish about costs.
So does this mean that Trump and the Twitter rationalists are right after all? Still, I think, no. Even if we are eventually forced to take a utilitarian approach, there is a moral difference between horrific sacrifice made only as a last resort, and racing to embrace that sacrifice from the start. What makes Trump’s Easter deadline so morally objectionable is its impatience for a tradeoff that we should be profoundly slow to make.
Squeamishness can be a vice, but then so can enthusiasm. Imagine you are hiking in the mountains with a group of friends. A rockslide traps one person’s leg. The victim isn’t badly hurt, but the nights here are very cold, and, with a snowstorm coming, rescue could take days. If you leave the trapped hiker overnight, they may die of exposure. You try everything to remove the rocks, but nothing works. Slowly, it dawns on you that your only choice may be the horrific option of sawing the leg free. You count the hours until nightfall, working out how long you can delay while you try to find another option.
In this scenario, it would be good to have brought along someone who isn’t squeamish, someone who will do what must be done if it comes to that. But imagine one of your friends now reveals herself to be not only unsqueamish, but positively enthusiastic for the role. Hours before nightfall, she starts sharpening the saw. Whatever happens next, you will wonder, later, just what sort of person your friend is.
This is what Trump and the Twitter rationalists are doing right now: they are sharpening the saw with gruesome enthusiasm. We are now only a few weeks into a pandemic that epidemiologists expect to last months. Public financing for the economic costs of lockdown has barely begun. Now is not the time to score cheap political points, nor to show off your radical rationalist mettle to your followers.
Of course there are other very good reasons for keeping the country temporarily locked down, even if we admit that we may later be forced to reopen it and accept some loss of life. The lockdown keeps our medical systems from being completely overwhelmed. Meanwhile, as medical science advances, there may be novel treatments to make the virus less deadly. And of course, eventually (though probably not soon) there may be a vaccine. Will we reach a point of economic unsustainability before then? Perhaps. But we should hold out as long as possible.
We’re still learning what it’s like to live in a world which most residents of wealthy countries have never experienced, where casually communicable disease is more than an inconvenience. Perhaps unprecedented choices will be demanded later. But we show deep disrespect for human life if we rush to find the earliest possible point at which it makes economic sense to throw the vulnerable under the virus.
Thankfully, public outrage seems to have instilled some decency. As I wrote this, Trump announced that social distancing must continue until the end of April, far past his Easter deadline. Unfortunately, that deadline will probably not be the last. We will likely be forced to have this conversation again and again. A morally healthy culture must accept the anxiety of leaving our last option until there really is nothing else to do.
Regina Rini (@rinireg) holds the Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Moral and Social Cognition at York University in Toronto
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