No One is an Island at a Time of Pandemic

Abstract

No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee''. (Donne [1624] 1987)The COVID-19 pandemic has focused attention on global health, ecology, economics, common welfare, and solidarity. Since March 11, 2020, when the World Health Organization (WHO) declared Covid-19 as a pandemic, the global population has faced locks-down. This has stimulated debate about public policy and the need for international co-operation. It has also stimulated personal reflections on what it means to be human. Drawing upon creative literature, we consider the ethical issues raised by social distancing and quarantine. A fundamental ethical question is how responsibility for the care of others is accepted and maintained, by those in retreat and outside; and how dialogue is maintained between them. We draw philosophically from the concept of dialogue and from the ethics of care.At its best, literature considers the ethical and moral issues of human social life, the deeply personal, and those in common. Writers have developed an imaginative understanding of the pathological conditions of plague, epidemic, and pandemic; how people respond, individually, as families, and as communities, when in isolation; and through accepting or refusing responsibility for others. The Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes says that creative literature questions reality through appealing to the imagination and encourages the reader to explore the persistent human dilemmas. In Occidental literature alone, there are classic texts, such as our epigraph from John Donne, an eighteenth-century English Metaphysical poet. Again, Albert Camus' novel The Plague, that drew upon Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year, considers ethical questions of solidarity and care for others raised by a crisis of disease and quarantine. Its epigraph from Robinson Crusoe, also by Daniel Defoe, considers solitude and separation. Camus' novel describes the experience of Oran, a coastal city in what was then French colonial Algeria when afflicted by bubonic plague. In the company of a narrator, Dr. Rieux, the reader