Public justification and expert disagreement over non-pharmaceutical interventions for the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

A wide range of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) have been introduced to stop or slow down the COVID-19 pandemic. Examples include school closures, environmental cleaning and disinfection, mask mandates, restrictions on freedom of assembly and lockdowns. These NPIs depend on coercion for their effectiveness, either directly or indirectly. A widely held view is that coercive policies need to be publicly justified—justified to each citizen—to be legitimate. Standardly, this is thought to entail that there is a scientific consensus on the factual propositions that are used to support the policies. In this paper, we argue that such a consensus has been lacking on the factual propositions justifying most NPIs. Consequently, they would on the standard view be illegitimate. This is regrettable since there are good reasons for granting the state the legitimate authority to enact NPIs under conditions of uncertainty. The upshot of our argument is that it is impossible to have both the standard interpretation of the permissibility of empirical claims in public justification and an effective pandemic response. We provide an alternative view that allows the state sufficient room for action while precluding the possibility of it acting without empirical support.

Why ethical frameworks fail to deliver in a pandemic: Are proposed alternatives an improvement?

“…Crucially, the knowledge accumulation and associated ethical deliberations, embedded at the core of a pragmatist approach, permit what, in retrospect, may look like decision-making mistakes. 64 This is less likely to be problematic if the decision-making process is transparent and the likelihood that policy modifications will be needed is foreshadowed at the start. A recent analysis of government responses to successive COVID-19 waves, by Boin and Lodge, indicates that administrative and political systems and the broader public are not organised to allow for these types of errors and adjustments in crisis management.…”

When Is Lockdown Justified?

“…For example, one might believe that departures from these evidentiary standards simply cannot be justified by competing concerns under any circumstances-broadly what Marcus Dahlquist and Henrik Kugelberg refer to as "the libertarian conclusion" (2021,4). But if we believe that there are some circumstances under which the costs of the libertarian conclusion are just too high (see Dahlquist and Kugelberg 2021), these sorts of considerations might point us in the direction of where, and for what reasons, rare departures from this high epistemic bar might be justified. 10 This, of course, does not suggest that policymakers have no further duties to continue to gather evidence, both about the danger they are responding to, and the impact of implemented policy measures.…”

Non-pharmaceutical Interventions and Social Distancing as Intersubjective Care and Collective Protection

“…Given a specific problem, the agents involved in the decisional process should be ready to accept solutions and alternatives that are efficient and evidence supported, despite their subjective and ideological preferences. This means that NPI imposition could be, in theory, perfectly legitimate from a democratic perspective if there are normative and empirical reasons that can be used to justify it publicly and acknowledged by most citizens (Timmerman 2020;Dahlquist and Kugelberg 2021).…”