Written with Eric Winsberg and Chris Surprenant, forthcoming in The Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal.

Abstract: In spring 2020, in response to the COVID-19 crisis, world leaders imposed severe restrictions on citizens’ civil, political, and economic liberties. These restrictions went beyond less controversial and less demanding social distancing measures seen in past epidemics. Many states and countries imposed universal lockdowns. In this paper, we argue that these restrictions have not been accompanied by the epistemic practices morally required for their adoption or continuation. While in theory, lockdowns can be justified, governments did not meet and have not yet met their justificatory burdens.

Read it on SSRN here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3605981&fbclid=IwAR1aCHoijFmqqZF3xToR_tIIMHAWr6byKag9eHmHGI5uH5Slfg18tDJ0DGI

(The SSRN link is going in and out for some reason. Sorry about that. I think it’s an issue on their end.)

There are a couple small issues with the current version that will get cleaned up before it goes into print. E.g., we say “would overwhelm” at one point when we should say “would just barely overwhelm” to be charitable.

Here’s a longer summary from inside the piece:

Appealing to ideas and principles shared within democratic or liberal traditions, we will show why governments have failed to meet the justificatory burdens required to legitimate the COVID-19 lockdowns. First, we will argue that the quality of the data and models used by officials was poor. We will argue that work on the philosophy of science and the reliability of experts gives us further reason to be cautious in deferring to such models. Second, we will argue (though this is far more obvious) that the decisions were extremely high stakes, imposing significant harms and costs upon people everywhere, especially those in extreme poverty. Together, this provides strong evidence that governments violated the Competence Principle and have failed to meet their justificatory burdens. We will not try to draw a precise line at which government’s would meet their epistemic obligations to justify the lockdowns. Any precise line would be controversial. Instead, we will argue the information, models, etc., that governments used were sufficiently poor that they fall below any plausible line we might draw.

One might object to this entire line of argument by saying that while imprisoning a defendant is “high stakes”, so is letting him go. In the same way, lockdowns are high stakes—involving mass suppression of freedom of movement and association, serious psychological trauma, and severe economic loss—but refusing to impose lockdowns is also high stakes—as it could lead to serious death. First, as we have emphasized, we do not argue for the analog of “letting the suspect go.” We argue for no general form of remedy to the situation of states failing to meet their epistemic duties when they deprive their citizens of rights. Second, even though it is true that there is a parity of risks, it also misses the point. If one simply rejects the ideals of constitutional democracy or simply rejects liberalism, then the question of whether to impose lockdowns or not becomes a utilitarian issue. At the time lockdowns were imposed, the quality of information in support of any choice was quite poor (as we will explain below), and so from utilitarian standpoint, it is just as difficult to justify staying open as it is to justify closing things down. But our point here is that constitutional democrats and liberals do not take all options to start on equal footing. They regard freedom as the default from which departures must be justified; the greater the imposition, the stronger the justification needed. While not all readers are liberals or constitutional democrats, these are nevertheless the dominant paradigms in political philosophy and actual political practice in the West.

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