COMMENT: The way Covid-19 death facts are reported (age and comorbidities) reflects how old people and those with chronic conditions are valued. Scientifically there’s an argument for this, but morally it’s troubling, writes Eusebius.
. I challenged his brute utilitarian reasoning — effectively that mostly old people would be at risk and not younger people if we sent kids to school sooner, thereby implying that, over the long term, it is better for society’s societal-level survival to get that process done sooner rather than later so we do not also suffer other public health disasters that come with a strict level 5 lockdown.
But if I am a 70-year-old citizen, with inherent dignity and rights to healthcare, quite apart from moral claims against the state to treat me decently, and equally, then why should my fragile embodiment be seen, without my consent too, as disposable? Here, by the way, we are no longer talking pure science or pure maths. We are now making value judgments that all citizens can legitimately have a view on and debate publicly. Yet this debate has not been centered much publicly. We have, along the way so far, talked a little bit about medical ethics and the choices faced by the individual healthcare worker needing to decide in real time who to allocate scarce resources to.
” are not quite the same — although there is a relationship — as the situation-specific ethical calls doctors are compelled to make in the ward. By this I mean that the kind of discussion Professor Madhi opened up brilliantly on my show is a discussion the public should be invited to enter, even if that requires first empowering laypeople to have the language and the frameworks, and the understanding of the normative issues, to join the discussions productively.
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