Ethics is concerned with what is good for individuals and society and is also described as moral philosophy. Ethical comes from the Greek ethos “moral character” and describes a person or behavior as right in the moral sense – truthful, fair, and honest. Ethical behavior means acting in ways consistent with what society and individuals typically think are good values, and involves demonstrating respect for key moral principles that include honesty, fairness, equality, dignity, diversity and individual rights. If ethical theories are to be useful in practice, they need to affect the way human beings behave. Ethics provides us with a moral map, a framework that we can use to find our way through difficult issues. Many people think that for many ethical issues there isn’t a single right answer – just a set of principles that can be applied to particular cases to give those involved some clear choices.
Ethics is not only about the morality of particular courses of action, but it’s also about the goodness of individuals and what it means to live a good life. The cognitive bandwidth model explains why low-income people make decisions that extend their poverty: When people have very little of something (money, food, time etc.), they focus on that scarce resource and don’t have the “bandwidth” to think about long-term concerns. Inequality prevents people from obtaining fair benefits from economic activities. Work can be a path out of poverty, but only when it provides a living wage, something hard to find in a labor market where precarity is a new norm of employment. When we reduce inequality, we will reduce social tension and discrimination. Preventing inequality can help promote social capital and stimulate the economy.
For the past 10,000 years or so, human society has been divided into antagonistic classes, and that has meant that morality has developed not as a general theory of human emancipation, but as a set of rules by which each class attempts to further its own interests. The most influential moral theories since the eighteenth century have tended to see morality as a necessary way of holding human impulses in check. A central component of Kant’s theory, for instance, is that morality has to control human desires in order to prevent social conflict. Underlying these views is the assumption that human beings are competitive individuals who seek their own self-interest and who will engage in a war of all against all if left to their own devices. Morality is supposed to moderate the war so that society can hold together. Today the neoliberal project subjects the world’s population to the judgement and morality of capital.
For Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992), freedom is not the absolute liberty to do as one pleases, rather it is the recognition of the necessity of law and morality in order to ensure that human interaction is cooperative and orderly. As we live in a society that emphasizes the individual, that is, individual effort, individual morality, individual choice, individual responsibility, individual talent, often makes it difficult to see the way in which life chances are socially structured. The dominant ideological presumption about social inequality is that everyone has an equal chance of success. However, systemic inequalities based on group membership, class, gender, ethnicity, and other variables that structure access to rewards and status determine who gets the opportunities to develop their abilities and their talents. Neoliberals believe individual effort, responsibility and talent determine how life chances are socially structured. Social inequality describes the unequal distribution of valued resources, rewards, and positions in society.
Socrates claimed that all he could ever know was the knowledge of his ignorance. Aristotle explained, “All men by nature desire knowledge.” Stoics believed that our knowledge comes from the acceptance of our perceptions as representative of external facts. Skeptics such as Sextus argued that people who believed they could know reality were subject to constant frustration and unhappiness in life. If they would genuinely suspend judgment, recognizing that their beliefs about reality were not necessarily valid, they would achieve peace of mind. Never affirming nor denying the possibility of knowledge, they should remain in a state of open-minded composure, waiting to see what might emerge. Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) noted “Knowledge like other good things is difficult, but not impossible; the dogmist forgets the difficulty, the skeptic denies the possibility. Both are mistaken, and their errors when widespread, produce social disaster.”
Fifty years ago, Harvard philosopher, John Rawls tried to work out how people would construct their society if the choice had to be made behind what he called a “veil of ignorance” about whether they will be rich, poor or somewhere in-between. Faced with the risk of being the worst off, Rawls posited, humans would not demand total equality, but would need to be assured of the trappings of a modern welfare state. The assurance of basic necessities and the opportunity to do better would form the foundation for social and political justice and provide the ability for people to assert themselves. Rawls’s monumental 1971 book, A Theory of Justice, is now regarded as the clearest moral and intellectual justification for modern center-left mixed economies. His theory of justice as fairness describes a society of free citizens holding equal basic rights and cooperating within an egalitarian economic system.1
To tackle discrimination arising from racial or ethnic origin, religion, or belief, disability, age or sexual orientation and sex, the EU relies on racial and employment legislation. With respect to Canada and the US, the action to reduce horizontal inequality within populations (for example, as a result of gender and ethnic discrimination) is rightly supported, however the proposals stop short of tackling vertical economic disparity across the whole population. This is a major oversight given the far-reaching costs of economic inequality. The Rio+20 (June 2012) “Future We Want Outcome Document” identifies: “…the need to achieve sustainable development by promoting sustained, inclusive and equitable economic growth, creating greater opportunities for all, reducing inequalities, raising basic standards of living, fostering equitable social development and inclusion, and promoting integrated and sustainable management of natural resources and ecosystems that supports, inter alia, economic, social and human development while facilitating ecosystem conservation, regeneration and restoration …”
The coronavirus amplifies ageism, older people discrimination. Healthcare rationing strategies that deny scarce medical resources to those with preexisting risk factors (i.e. diabetes, heart disease and lung disease) will disproportionately harm people of color who suffer these health conditions at greater rates because of the effects of structural racism. This can give cover for dehumanization and racial discrimination under the conditions of scarcity. Discrimination means that people in communities of color can’t follow many recommended individual actions for the pandemic including staying at home, working from home, stocking up on groceries, drive-through testing and social distancing. Low income essential workers have essentially become the human buffer against the coronavirus for people with higher income. The coronavirus pandemic is primed to accelerate socioeconomic and life-or-death medical care disparities.
The libertarian justification holds that inequalities result from uncoerced exchanges between individuals, they are justified because no one was forced to do anything against their will. Robert Nozick, champion of libertarian ideas, accepts the Rawlsian claim that inequalities emerge for morally arbitrary reasons: Many people who are not especially virtuous get ahead. Many who may be deserving languish in poverty. Nozick raises concern of the fact of moral arbitrariness in the distribution of wealth can actually justify a heavy interventionist state. Drawing on Locke and Kant, Nozick argues that we should possess a very significant number of rights to protect us from being used as “means to another’s end” – as efforts to ameliorate the inequalities that emerge for morally arbitrary reasons will inevitably and unjustifiably compromise liberty. Instead, he says, we want freedom in order to realize ourselves, even though the process may well result in inequalities.
In applying Rawls’s theory of justice to the social determinants of health, Norman Daniels and colleagues argue that justice requires flattening “socioeconomic inequalities in a robust way, assuring far more than a decent minimum.”2 The social determinants of health that Michael Marmot has spent decades studying – early childhood development, education, employment and working conditions, having enough money to live on, healthy places and communities – will all be impacted by the pandemic. In the short term there will be increases in inequalities in social conditions, which over time will lead to inequalities in health. Following the financial crisis of 2009, government argued the need to introduce austerity policies and cut health and other basic services. For the COVID-19 pandemic threat they threw that orthodoxy out the window and said: “Whatever it takes.”3 The outstanding question: why are they ignoring the profound problem of inequalities and the health inequities in society?
1 John Authers. (30 March 2020) How Coronavirus is shaking up the moral universe. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/world-news/how-coronavirus-is-shaking-up-the-moral-universe/articleshow/74888344.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium =text&utm_campaign=cppst
2 Jennifer Prah Ruger (16 April 2014) Ethics of the social determinants of health https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3988689/
3 Charlie Cooper. (29 April 2020) The next pandemic: Rising inequality. https://www.politico.eu/article/the-next-pandemic-rising-inequality-coronavirus-covid19-economic-turmoil-lockdowns/