Douglas Thomas
Preventive detention shares many features with the quarantine measures sometimes employed in the context of infectious disease control. Both interventions involve imposing constraints on freedom of movement and association. Both interventions are standardly undeserved: in quarantine, the detained individual deserves no detention (or so I will assume), and in preventive detention, the individual has already endured any detention that can be justified by reference to desert. Both interventions are, in contrast to civil commitment under mental health legislation, normally imposed on more-or-less fully autonomous individuals. And both interventions are intended to reduce the risk that the constrained individual poses to the public. Yet despite these similarities, preventive detention and quarantine have received rather different moral report cards, with preventive detention attracting far greater criticism. One possible explanation for this is that many people implicitly endorse the view that preventive detention is always, in at least one respect, more morally problematic than quarantine. In this chapter I challenge that view by considering and rejecting six attempts to justify it, beginning with four attempts that I think can be easily dismissed, and proceeding to consider in more detail two attempts that are more resilient to criticism. Ultimately, I argue that all six attempts fail: preventive detention is not always more problematic, in one respect, than quarantine. I conclude by drawing out some implications of my argument. Of course, it does not follow from my argument that preventive detention is not in some cases more problematic than quarantine. A secondary purpose of this chapter, pursued in parallel to the first, is to identify the considerations that determine whether and when preventive detention is indeed in some respect more problematic.
预防性拘留与传染病控制背景下有时采用的检疫措施有许多共同特征。这两种干预措施都涉及对行动自由和结社自由施加限制。这两种干预措施通常都是不应得的：在检疫中，被拘留者不应被拘留（至少我将这样假设），而在预防性拘留中，个人已经承受了任何可依据应得性来证明合理的拘留。与根据精神卫生立法进行的民事收容不同，这两种干预措施通常施加于或多或少完全自主的个人。而且这两种干预措施的目的都是降低受限制的个人对公众构成的风险。然而，尽管有这些相似之处，预防性拘留和检疫却得到了截然不同的道德评价，预防性拘留受到的批评要多得多。对此的一种可能解释是，许多人隐含地赞同这样一种观点，即预防性拘留至少在一个方面总是比检疫在道德上更成问题。在本章中，我通过考虑并驳斥六种为这一观点辩护的尝试来挑战这一观点，首先是四种我认为可以轻易驳回的尝试，然后更详细地考虑两种更经得起批评的尝试。最终，我认为所有这六种尝试都失败了：预防性拘留并不总是在一个方面比检疫更成问题。我通过阐述我的论点的一些含义来得出结论。当然，我的论点并不意味着预防性拘留在某些情况下不会比检疫更成问题。本章与第一个目的并行的第二个目的是确定那些决定预防性拘留是否以及何时在某些方面确实更成问题的考虑因素。
