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2020-05-06 -Land of the Free

[AIER] Human well-being, of course, requires being alive. And this well-being rises with greater physical health and with reduced risks of having one’s health put in peril. Life, health, and physical safety are unquestionably good and, hence, worthy to pursue. The sciences of medicine and epidemiology are, in turn, useful sources of information for pursuing these goods.

But physical health and safety are not of infinite value; they are not "priceless." The same is true for life itself.

When stated so starkly, this observation strikes many people as being plainly mistaken. Yet everyone, every day, through his or her actions proves its truth. Every day every person acts in ways that demonstrate that he or she has many preferences that differ from, and sometimes are in competition with, the preference for survival and good health.

Here’s a familiar but useful example. In almost all cases when you travel in an automobile you increase your chances of being killed or injured. If you’re the driver, you also increase your chances of killing and injuring other people — your passengers, other drivers, and pedestrians. Yet you nevertheless choose to travel by automobile, thereby proving that you value the increased convenience and speed made possible by automobile travel over either not making the trip at all or making it by some less-perilous means. To choose to travel by car is to choose to put your own life and the lives of many others in greater danger.

Importantly, your choosing to travel by automobile is not evidence of your rejection of science, of your irrationality, or of your being blinded by some dodgy ideology. Your choice, instead, is evidence that the outcomes and experiences valued by human beings include more than physical well-being. Your choice is evidence also of the reality that additional increments of many of these other outcomes and experiences — things such as convenience, comfort, time, pleasure, excitement, helping others, contentment, enlightenment — are very often worth more than are the increments of health and safety that are sacrificed by pursuing additional amounts of these other outcomes and experiences.

To recognize this fact (!) about human preferences is to recognize that epidemiologists and other natural scientists are emphatically not scientifically able to determine what is for us — the many individuals who comprise society — the best response to COVID-19. While information supplied by these scientists is useful and should play a role in determining public policy, no such information, regardless of its accuracy, is sufficient to reveal to us or to governments what the ’best’ response is. To suppose that it can play this role is akin to supposing that your family physician can scientifically determine when, for how long, and for what reasons you ’should’ travel by automobile.

Posted by M. Murcek 2020-05-06 08:51|| || Front Page|| [11 views ] Top

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