CeDEx Seminar - Katie Steel (Australian National University)

Pandemic decision-making and the spread of social risk

Abstract: This talk concerns the argument for the “long lockdown” approach to managing social risk in a pandemic. Those who see “long lockdown” as robustly better than more light-touch policy approaches often appeal to the fact that large losses of life-years to those persons who would suffer greatly from the virus are not easily outweighed by the mere addition of the much smaller losses of those who would have their liberties curtailed by lockdown. But opponents of long lockdown challenge the empirical basis of this story (perhaps granting the ethical claim). They argue that lockdown too, has severe individual losses of comparable magnitude and number to the more light-touch policies. This is a (contestable) empirical claim that we can refer to as “comparable expected losses”. Here I argue that, even if this empirical claim is true, there is a further dimension of social outcomes that may be deemed ethically significant: not merely the expected losses of any given magnitude, but the spread of risk from which the expectations are derived. I draw on the distinction between ex post and ex ante assessments of social risk – a familiar distinction in the theoretical literature but not one that has not played much role in debates about pandemic decision making.