False dilemma stampeded the world into shutting down economies and tying up people like Gulliver

ON the eve of the lifting of the economic lockdown of the country and the draconian restrictions on our lives, it is fair to ask: How was the nation stampeded into shutting down our economy and tying up our people as though they were Gulliver in Jonathan Swift’s tale?

Why did a viral disease which originated in Wuhan, China mutate into a pandemic that has plunged the world into a nervous breakdown?

All this has happened because otherwise thinking people and responsible leaders willfully surrendered to groupthink and foisted on the public a false narrative about the health emergency. Instead of rallying the people behind a rational plan of action to fight the pandemic, they invented false dilemmas to divert public attention away from the crux of the problem

As we now approach the climax of the crisis, it is important to keep in mind these false dilemmas because they are the principal reason why the nation was shoehorned into the economic lockdown strategy and away from the more sensible course of mitigation measures and progressive herd immunization.

Genuine and false dilemma

A favorite tactic in this argument is the use of a false dilemma in presenting the alternatives in a given issue.

A genuine dilemma presents all the alternatives in an issue, to reflect the options available.

A false dilemma directs attention toward a false choice between alternatives that are not exhaustive, in order to force a selection of a preferred alternative.

The lockdown strategy has been advanced through the presentation of a false dilemma to force the choice of the lockdown as the best policy.

Three false arguments

I call attention here to three specimens of the false dilemma.

1. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s argument: “I’d say the cost of a human life, a human life is priceless. Period.”

He contended that stretching the economically catastrophic lockdowns into the foreseeable future was the way forward for his home state.

2. Ramon S. Ang, president of San Miguel Corp. ( SMC), presented an argument in favor of the extension of the Metro Manila and Luzon lockdown as essentially a choice between life and money.

He downplayed the negative impact of the enhanced community quarantine on businesses, saying he would “choose life over money.”

“At this point, what is more important are lives, not money,” Ang said in an interview with CNN Philippines, which he owns. “We can make money again but life, once you lose it, is gone forever. So, between life and money, I’d choose life.”

3. My third example of the false dilemma is the “dollars vs deaths” argument advanced by my fellow columnist Rudy Romero in the Manila Standard.

He wrote: “The global war against the coronavirus [ disease 2019 or Covid- 19] has created a monumental dilemma for the economic policymakers of the countries infected by the virus. The dilemma stems from the fact that the Covid- 19 crisis has two elements: a medical/ health element and an economic element. The medical/ health element is the pandemic that is raging across over 100 countries on five continents… The economic element is the virtual shutdown of the world economy, with thousands of business enterprises having to stop operating and millions of workers having lost their jobs.

“It is a terrible dilemma for economic policymakers. If they accord priority to the Covid- 19 pandemic and allow their national economies to progressively slide into severe recession, they will be accused of being insensitive to the dire situation of millions of families with jobless breadwinners and the hundreds of thousands of small and medium- size enterprises that are going out of business. On the other hand, if the focus of their thinking is preventing the economy from going into a prolonged recession… the economic policymakers will be charged with pursuing the wrong priority…”

Cuomo’s argument about the worth of a human life has been dismissed as grotesque by some critics. Issues and insights was particularly scathing in its editorial comment. It said:

“In a world where resources are limited and everything involves a trade- off, we are constantly making decisions that put a value on human lives. Federal regulators have even set an amount for what’s called the ‘ value of a statistical life.’ During the Obama administration, the EPA put that value at close to $ 10 million. Regulations that cost more than that to save one ‘ statistical life’ are seen as costing more than they’re worth.

“So, the relevant question is, how much are we spending in an attempt to save someone from a Covid- 19 induced death, and is it worth it?

“As it stands, nobody has a clue. “The only thing we know for sure is that the cost is mindboggling. One report puts the price tag for the shutdown, now stretching into its third month, at $ 5.2 trillion…

“The massively intrusive and costly government lockdowns are looking more and more like the most expensive and least effective regulations ever imposed in this nation’s history.”

Life vs money

Ramon Ang’s life vs money argument can be effectively refuted by the fact that this is is not a full presentation of the alternatives in the coronavirus pandemic. Our government is not being forced to choose between saving human life and saving the economy. Our government can, in fact, do both. It can save human lives, or as many as it can, and it can also choose to protect the economy and the jobs of citizens. And this, in fact, is what our government has chosen by deciding to lift the economic shutdown rather than prolong it.

Ang elected to present his dilemma as a choice between “life or money” because he meant to dramatize his readiness to choose life over money, which seemingly looks noble of him.

In fact, it is patently false to suggest that the SMC chief executive officer is being forced to choose between life and money by the pandemic. This was surely never the case. SMC has continued to prosper in its business during the pandemic.

Rudy Romero is surely correct to present the issue in policy mnaking terms, because in this way he shows that the issue cuts to the heart of policy making in the country.

But ‘ dollars vs death’ is a sentimental way to present the choice, designed to weigh the scales against money.

Lockdown unproven, costly and ineffective

I reject all these false dilemma arguments on the grounds that they are designed to promote and prolong the lockdown, which I submit is unproven, costly and ineffective.

“A human life is priceless” and “life over money” may sound like nice and noble sentiments, but their moral implications are grotesque. They require us to ignore any amount of suffering that’s not reflected in mortality statistics, as long as the policy that inflicts it can be expected to prolong even one person’s life.

If we take these gentlemen seriously, the relevant consideration is the net impact on mortality and nothing else, no matter how many people are affected or how much they value the things they are forced to sacrifice.

That position is not just impractical but immoral. This is fundamentally wrong, because it implies that saving one person’s life is worth throwing millions of other lives out of work and in jeopardy.