The Ethics of Everyday Life in the Midst of a Pandemic

Abstract

Elderly individuals are at higher risk of serious illness and death if they become infected by the coronavirus. During the current pandemic, my wife and I, at ages seventy-two and seventy-one, respectively, have been paying a person laid off from a job to purchase groceries-a practice that exposes the shopper to risk of infection for our benefit. In this essay, I examine this practice with respect to the normative concepts of treating another person as a means, coercion, exploitation, and complicity.