Ethical implications of COVID-19 management—is freedom a desired aim, or a desired means to an end?

TL;DR

The paper explores how the pandemic exposed weaknesses in free-market societies' ability to manage collective threats and questions if personal freedom should be regulated by the free market.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel ethical analysis of how free-market principles conflict with collective pandemic management and surveillance systems.

Findings

Free-market societies lack structure to manage collective threats like pandemics.

Surveillance systems based on vaccination status raise ethical concerns about personal freedom.

The paper questions if personal freedom should be regulated by market principles during crises.

Abstract

Most developed societies managed, due to their prosperity and resource abundance, to structure relationships among free individuals in such a way to leave them fundamentally unstructured, according to the free market principle. As the pandemic illustrated well, this lack of structure when facing collective threats makes it impossible to collectively and proportionately assess and manage its implications and consequences. This may be particularly precarious when introducing comprehensive, monitoring and tracking, surveillance systems dependent on the vaccination status of the individual. If our previously shared aims were successfully and collectively enacted with the greatest of costs, is it permissible that the degree of personal freedom is a commodity, and everyone is a compulsory participant? The need to control one’s COVID-19 status allows the individual to become legally free from excessive enactment of sovereignty of the state. Should these rights be regulated by the free market?