The Ethics Of Pandemics

A portion of the revenue from this book’s sales will be donated to Doctors Without Borders to assist in the fight against COVID-19. The rapid spread of COVID-19 has had an unprecedented impact on modern health-care systems and has given rise to a number of complex ethical issues. This collection of readings and case studies offers an overview of some of the most pressing of these issues, such as the allocation of ventilators and other scarce resources, the curtailing of standard privacy measures for the sake of public health, and the potential obligations of health-care professionals to continue operating in dangerous work environments.

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has brought a broad range of ethical problems to the forefront, raising fundamental questions about the role of government in response to such outbreaks, the scarcity and allocation of health care resources, the unequal distribution of health risks and economic impacts, and the extent to which individual freedom can be restricted. In this clear introduction to the topic Iwao Hirose explores these ethical questions and analyzes the central issues in the ethics of pandemic response and preparedness such as: The general nature of pandemics and the ethics of preparedness Ethical questions about general goals of pandemic response and preparedness The distribution of scarce resources, for example, ventilators, hospital beds, antiviral drugs, and vaccines Restrictions on individual freedom Ethical questions in the wake of pandemics, including contact tracing, vaccine passports, and socioeconomic inequalities. With the use of real-life examples and a clear philosophical approach, The Ethics of Pandemics is a much-needed introduction to some of the most important ethical issues surrounding pandemics. It is essential reading for students of ethics, bioethics, and political philosophy and will also be of interest to those working in related areas such as public policy, public health, health law, nursing, and life sciences.

This book is for readers who wish to understand the ethical implications of the COVID-19 pandemic — holistically — on communities, politics, the economy, the environment, international relations, public health, and, most importantly, on their own lives and their own futures. It also helps readers to think through the wide-ranging ethical implications of the new age of global pandemics. The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed all of our lives to such an extent that no single publication will ever be able to capture its complexity. The book acknowledges this complexity by embracing interdisciplinary dialogue. It is open to diverse points of view, different ethical systems, and a wide variety of academic disciplines. It suggests three broad avenues to exploring the subject: Ethics for Pandemics: What ethical theories are useful for pandemic living? Ethics in Pandemics: How are long-standing ethical dilemmas revealed in pandemics? Ethics of Pandemics: How should politicians and public health professionals create ethical systems of pandemic management? Interdisciplinary perspectives are another key feature of the book and reflect the important insights that many academic disciplines — medical ethics and public health, history, political science, economics, behavioral and evolutionary psychology, and climate science — bring to bear on the subject. In the chapters, the author joins theory and practice, providing an overview of the major ethical theories: Kant and Deontology Utilitarianism and Consequentialist Ethics Social Contract Theory Egoism and Altruism Virtue Ethics It then uses these theories to analyze both COVID-19 and also historical pandemics, including typhus, smallpox, the Black Death, HIV/AIDS, and polio. Ethics and Pandemics: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on COVID-19 and Future Pandemics prepares readers to better understand ethical living during times of crisis. While written for students pursuing any discipline, it is particularly suited for those seeking degrees in public health, health care, political science, and philosophy. Furthermore, non-specialized readers and members of the general public will find the book of interest.

This book contains original essays that look at contagious/infectious disease pandemics and the ethical public policy and administration these have entailed. In particular, the pandemics of the 1918 flu pandemic, HIV in the 1990s, SARS in 2003, Ebola from 2014–2016 and the novel COVID-19 in 2020 are highlighted. The contributions in this work offer the reader insights in these and several other recent pandemics that present differently—either via contagion or mortality rate—and how each should be addressed by countries of various sorts. This book is a must for the ongoing debate on how we should treat public health crises, such as the one we have all just encountered in the novel COVID-19 pandemic.

This book directly addresses the social and economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. It does so by focusing on both the immediate effects during the pandemic and the lockdowns, as well as the issues related to the long-term social consequences that are likely to result from the economic crisis in the coming years. To date, most philosophical essays and books have focused on the health aspects of the pandemic, and in particular on the fields of medical ethics and public health ethics. Containing a truly international and interdisciplinary group of scholars, a unique and global perspective is offered on the rarely discussed social and economic consequences of the pandemic. This book is of great interest to academic philosophers, but also to researchers from the social sciences.

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected every human being on the planet and forced us all to reflect on the bioethical issues it raises. In this timely book, Gregory Pence examines a number of relevant issues, including the fair allocation of scarce medical resources, immunity passports, tradeoffs between protecting senior citizens and allowing children to flourish, discrimination against minorities and the disabled, and the myriad issues raised by vaccines.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a defining event of the 21st century. It has taken over eighteen million lives, closed national borders, put whole populations into quarantine and devastated economies. Yet while COVID-19 is catastrophic, it is not unique. Children who have been home-schooled during COVID-19 will almost certainly face another pandemic in their lifetime - one at least as bad-and potentially much worse-than this one. The WHO has referred to such a future (currently unknown) pathogen as “Disease X”. The defining feature of a pandemic is its scale-the simultaneous threat to millions or even billions of lives. That scale leads to unavoidable ethical dilemmas since the lives and livelihood of all cannot be protected. But since one of the most powerful ways of arresting the spread of a pandemic is to reduce contact between people, pandemic ethics also challenges some of our most widely accepted ethical beliefs about individual liberty and autonomy. Finally, pandemic ethics brings vividly to the foreground debates about the structure of society, inequalities, disadvantage and our global responsibilities. In this timely and vital collection, Dominic Wilkinson and Julian Savulescu bring together a global team of leading philosophers, lawyers, economists, and bioethicists. The book reviews the COVID-19 pandemic to ask not only 'did our societies make the right ethical choices?', but also 'what lessons must we learn before Disease X arrives?'