EACME Newsletter 55

We will all have developed insights and understandings from reflecting on our own experiences of lockdown so far in the pandemic. For some, who have lost love ones, the impact will be profound. For others lockdown will have given too much or too little social isolation, as the normal benefits and separations of work and home life have been broken down: to this extent, many of us will have experienced different lockdowns, yet all will be reminded that we are at heart creatures who are vulnerable to changes in our social environment as much as to our own states of mind. This, then, is a change in perspective wrought on (at least some) academic medical ethics by the pandemic, where the prior focus on micro-interactions between individuals draws back to reveal the panorama of interconnectedness and mutual vulnerability. Historians of philosophy tell us that past societal traumas have in the past ushered in profound changes in the directions of theory: the US philosopher and jurist Jeremy Waldron has argued that the wake of the 18th and 19th century revolutions of Europe caused the abandonment of the enlightenment focus upon individual rights, ushering in the focus on the life of society as a whole. This led to the work of Marx, Durkheim and Weber. Waldron argues that it was only tectonic impact of the events of the Second World War that caused policy makers and theoreticians to return their focus to the individual. While COVID-19 is clearly different from the French Revolution, the huge challenges of COVID-19 are only just at a beginning. A pandemic still ravages the world, while a global recession of gigantic proportions threatens to deepen the wounds already left by the savage impact of the global economic crisis. The prevailing consensus of economic and social liberalism was already teetering. Change may indeed be needed, but change can sweep aside things of value as easily as things without. We must all use our voices to ensure that the advances of the past – toleration, liberty, rationality – are defended and preserved amid whatever change follows.