The emerging field of pandemic ethics (Book Chapter / 2023)

The COVID pandemic has raised a plethora of moral questions relative, for instance, to the behaviour of citizens during a health crisis, or to the establishment of protocols for a fair allocation of scarce medical resources, or to the behaviour of political leaders towards their people, or to the behaviour of richer states toward poorer states in the distribution of vaccines. Yet little effort has been made in the attempt to conceptualize these and other morally relevant questions within the conceptual framework of a distinctive field, namely that of pandemic ethics. 

Just in the same way climate ethics emerged, nearly 30 years ago, as a field of investigation, pandemic ethics is now gradually emerging as a unified whole as well. This chapter examines some important methodological challenges that both pandemic ethics and climate ethics have to address: they deal with issues related to social justice, international justice, and intergenerational justice at the same time. But while anthropogenic climate change is a one-off phenomenon in the history of humankind, pandemics have been cyclical events. The chapter shows, then, how the cyclical nature of pandemics has important implications for our understanding of pandemic ethics as a field of investigation in its own right.

[ Routledge ]

Araujo, Marcelo de (2023) "The emerging field of pandemic ethics". In: Evandro Barbosa (ed.). Moral Challenges in a Pandemic Age. New York: Routledge, Chapter 16, pp. 283–307. ISBN 9781032315201.