Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
Bioethics. 2023 Nov;37(9):886-896. doi: 10.1111/bioe.13217. Epub 2023 Aug 28.
The debate around lockdowns as a response to the recent pandemic is typically framed in terms of a tension between freedom and health. However, on some views, protection of health or reduction of virus-related risks can also contribute to freedom. Therefore, there might be no tension between freedom and health in public health restrictions. I argue that such views fail to appreciate the different understandings of freedom that are involved in the trade-off between freedom and health. Grasping these distinctions would allow to appreciate why different people give more weight to different aspects of limitations of freedom, including whether certain options are made simply risky or impossible, whether limitations of freedom are posed intentionally or happen accidentally, whether risks are beyond a threshold of acceptability, and who gets to decide that. I provide a conceptual analysis of the relationship between different types of freedom, public health policies, viruses and diseases. As I argue, identifying what freedom-based reasons count for and against different types of public health restrictions requires distinguishing between viruses and diseases, between lockdowns and other types of restrictive policies, and between risks posed by viruses and threats of penalties involved by restrictive policies.
关于封锁作为应对近期大流行病的一种回应的争论，通常是在自由和健康之间的紧张关系框架内进行的。然而，从某些观点来看，保护健康或降低与病毒相关的风险也有助于自由。因此，在公共卫生限制方面，自由和健康之间可能不存在紧张关系。我认为，这些观点没有意识到在自由和健康之间的权衡中所涉及的不同自由理解。把握这些区别将使我们能够理解为什么不同的人对自由限制的不同方面给予更多的重视，包括某些选择是否仅仅被认为是有风险的或不可能的，自由限制是有意还是偶然产生的，风险是否超过了可接受的阈值，以及由谁来决定。我对不同类型的自由、公共卫生政策、病毒和疾病之间的关系进行了概念分析。正如我所主张的，确定基于自由的理由对不同类型的公共卫生限制是有利还是不利，需要区分病毒和疾病、封锁和其他类型的限制政策，以及病毒带来的风险和限制政策所涉及的惩罚威胁。
