Human Rights-inspired Governmentality: COVID-19 through a Human Dignity Perspective

Abstract

The paper aims to reconstruct the debate over the pandemic in Italy to highlight the logic of the discourse that guided the various voices. The two governmentalities that have monopolized the public and political debate are biomedical and economic. The former brought the defense of biological life (zoé) as the ultimate element of truth and legitimacy of the government’s action. The latter, based the “true” justification upon a careful cost–benefit calculation and the protection of the interests of homo oeconomicus. The debate lacked a “social” perspective capable of placing dignity and human rights as a compass for intervention. What has been lost by limiting the question to a choice between defending bare life or defending economic interests? Behind an apparent impartial universalism that would drive both biomedical and economic logic, there emerges a form of discrimination and lack of protection for specific sectors of society, in particular the marginal ones.