Pandemic ethics and moral responsibility: an investigation in the light of the philosophical debate on climate ethics

Abstract

The COVID pandemic has raised several moral issues related, for example, to the vulnerability of indigenous populations to the new disease, or to the behavior of richer states towards other states in the distribution of vaccines, or in relation to the elaboration of protocols for the allocation of scarce resources using the age of the patients as a criterion for the allocation. Considered in themselves, these questions concern different domains of investigation in moral philosophy, namely: social justice, international justice, and intergenerational justice. To date, little effort has been made in the attempt to show that these and many other morally relevant issues discussed during the COVID pandemic should be examined as pertinent to a distinct field of investigation in moral philosophy, to which I refer in this article as pandemic ethics. In this article, I seek to establish a conceptual framework for pandemic ethics having especially mind some recent discussions on attributions of responsibility in the context of climate ethics.