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The Ethics of Everyday Life in the Midst of a Pandemic
Author(s) -
Miller Franklin G.
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
hastings center report
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.515
H-Index - 63
eISSN - 1552-146X
pISSN - 0093-0334
DOI - 10.1002/hast.1118
Subject(s) - complicity , coercion (linguistics) , pandemic , normative , everyday life , wife , psychology , social psychology , criminology , covid-19 , sociology , law , medicine , political science , philosophy , disease , linguistics , pathology , infectious disease (medical specialty)
Elderly individuals are at higher risk of serious illness and death if they become infected by the coronavirus. During the current pandemic, my wife and I, at ages seventy‐two and seventy‐one, respectively, have been paying a person laid off from a job to purchase groceries—a practice that exposes the shopper to risk of infection for our benefit. In this essay, I examine this practice with respect to the normative concepts of treating another person as a means, coercion, exploitation, and complicity .