COVID- 19 as a philosophy test
It turns out I should have taken more philosophy courses in college and stayed more alert in the ones I actually did take.
The past year has been a long series of philosophy problems. One could even argue that the past year has been a kinked- up skein of an interconnected version of the Trolley Problem.
( If you watched the fabulous comedy series “The Good Place,” you can skip this next part. “The Good Place” is certainly the only comedy series to have two philosophy professors as on- board consultants for all of its scripts.)
The plain vanilla Trolley Problem goes like this: a runaway trolley is hurtling down a hill. It will kill five unwitting people unless you throw a switch, in which case it will hurtle down a different track, killing one. What do you do
There are lots of variants. The most famous one puts you on a bridge with a fat man. ( The implication is you are too lightweight to cause the desired result by sacrificing yourself.) To save five people, you must throw the fat man off the bridge and onto the switch even as he screams in protest. ( My advice: if you spend a lot of time with philosophers, stay trim, because they think about these things.)
Other variants: What if the fat man was the villain who caused the runaway trolley? What if instead of a fat man it was Rudy Giuliani? What if it was Rudy Giuliani and there was no runaway trolley? Would it be moral to throw him off the bridge just for the heck of it? And so on.
Now let us consider Ned Lamont in 2020. ( For some of this I am going to rely on the work of Michael Diesenhof, which sounds like the name of a philosopher but is in fact a person who sends me interesting emails.)
Ned’s original Trolley Problem was essentially that a lot of people were going to get sick and in some cases die unless he threw a switch which closed bars and restaurants and gyms and church gatherings and weddings and schools and offices.
So he did. And it worked. Aided somewhat by the warm weather ( although it should be noted that COVID got way worse in plenty of other states during the warm weather), Lamont and this state witnessed a steep decline in deaths and hospitalizations.
Deaths from COVID, which at their peak went higher than 100 per day, dropped into the single digits, with quite a few days in August and September registering the always popular zero deaths.
From July 3 to Sept. 28, the number of people hospitalized for COVID on any given day never broke 100.
In December, daily hospitalizations soared up over 1,000 and stayed up there. Daily deaths are generally in the 30- something range.
They’re probably never going back to their high numbers in the spring season, when hospitalizations crested 1,800 and deaths ( see above) broke 100. This is mainly because clinicians learned a lot about how to treat the disease and got more subtle about who needs to be hospitalized and for how long.
Still, a Diesenhofian might ask: why not do what you did the first time around? Why not do forced closings and get the death rate down?
The answer is complex. It turns out there are things we value roughly as much as we value human life. Freedom. Children’s education. A more robust economy. Rock- hard deltoids. Weddings where people do the Electric Slide without spreading out across three towns.
To get those things here in Connecticut, we are willing to let the trolley run over — give or take — 25 people a day.
I’m not saying this is wrong. ( Yet.) I’m just saying we should own it. And I’m not blaming Lamont. He’s done a very good job. Let’s face it, he gets criticized way more for doing too much than for not doing enough. The implied collective will of our society tilts in the direction of trading those lives for other kinds of benefits.
The next thing that comes up is: aren’t a lot of these people really old? Weren’t they going to die anyway? You mean I can’t go to the bar because some 76- year- old woman might die?
I have to say that I have been taken aback by the almost zesty spirit in which the disposability of old people has been invoked by persons who want restrictions lifted. I’m 66, which means I’m apparently coming to the point where you either have to make banana bread out of me or throw me away.
There are cultures where the old are venerated. This is not one of them. ( I should add the COVID is now the third leading cause of death for Americans between 45 and 54. The premise that it preys only on old people is not only heartless but false.)
We’ve moved on from there to an extraordinarily complex and deeply philosophical conversation about who should get vaccinated first — a set of considerations that involve utilitarianism and assignment of moral worth. The old people do a lot better in this conversation, I’m happy to report.
Almost all political decisions are, when stripped down, philosophical. You might ask why a sitcom has an on- premises philosopher and governments do not.
Socrates got all mixed up with Athenian government and politics and a group called the Thirty Tyrants, and you know what happened to him.
His protégé Plato went to Syracuse ( the one in Sicily) and tried to coach a local deranged tyrant named Dionysius I on the finer points of moral philosophy. The ruler — who was so paranoid about being stabbed that he had his hair singed off with coal rather than let anyone cut it — sold Plato into slavery.
Maybe philosophers learned their lesson way back then. And maybe it’s up to us to become better philosopher- citizens.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go meet Rudy up on the bridge.
Colin McEnroe’s column appears every Sunday, his newsletter comes out every Thursday and you can hear his radio show every weekday on WNPR 90.5. Email him at colin@ ctpublic.org. Sign up for his newsletter at http://bit.ly/colinmcenroe.