Vulnerability and deliberation in times of epidemic

Abstract

The COVID-19 epidemic has brought us face to face with an unprecedented situation in which we discover our vulnerability in varied and dramatic ways. Although protected by powerful technology, we now observe our enormous hardship in failing to respond to the threat to our health and survival. Our fragility is revealed in different ways: The vulnerability of our bodily and mortal condition, which forces us to take refuge in confinement, isolate ourselves from an environment that has become hostile and where we also discover our psychological vulnerability; the vulnerability of the most helpless situations, which highlight the weakness of the social and health systems to protect those who are in a more delicate condition; the vulnerability of resource management systems, which face complex decision-making processes to preserve justice; and what we could call a moral vulnerability, because our ability to manage deliberative environments to adequately resolve value conflicts is questioned. These vulnerable environments need to be examined to account for how the reality of the pandemic forces us to rethink and develop an ethic commensurate with the circumstances.