The ethics of being a second-degree contact

Ethics

Jul 9

The Covid pandemic has made moral decision-making an everyday business. We are constantly confronted with the fact that we could be carriers of a deadly virus. No wonder ethics research has thrived in the last two years.

Plenty of words have been written about ethical management of scarce resources such as hospital beds or ventilators. People have asked themselves if it’s fair to force citizens to get vaccinated, or to penalise those who refuse to do so. We have seen liberal and illiberal states manage their lockdowns quite differently, and we have all wondered at what point individual rights trump collective ones. Some may have asked themselves if it’s fair that younger people should be locked down in a fundamental phase of their lives in order to protect older people, who have already lived most of theirs.

Today, I would like to consider the ethics of one of the most common daily pandemic situations - or at least one that I am very familiar with: being a second-degree contact. You are leading your life, doing your things, wearing your face mask perhaps, but still meeting people and going places. Then a close friend calls: she found out a person she met tested positive to Covid.

The moral stages of second-degree contacts

Confronted with the bad news, the first thing you think about is the law. The law says you’re fine, you don’t have to be quarantined or even take a test, you can get on with your happy life. That is a relief. You haven’t done anything wrong and you can keep behaving as you did before. Besides, you’re vaccinated, so you should be at least partially immune to the virus. While your friend, the infamous first-degree contact, will be confined at home, renouncing her whole social life, you’ll go out.

But then a painful awareness arises: the law isn’t the same as morality. You know, or should I say you feel, deep down, that you should isolate instead of going out. After all, if your friend is at risk, why shouldn’t you be at risk too, considering that you were in contact with her?

All of a sudden, you contemplate a gruesome scenario. You look at things retrospectively. Everything isn’t resolved by the choices you make from the moment you become aware that you are a second-degree contact. You’ve been in contact with people before you knew, people who met old people, unvaccinated people, terminally ill people who could die because of you. Suddenly, you think of yourself as a super-spreader.

You think it could not get any worse. What is worse than being a super-spreader? Well, making your whole social circle, and beyond, paranoid for no reason might be worse. Because in a way, you could have been a super-spreader, even though you were a benign and innocent one. But if you do tell all your friends that you could have gotten Covid while you know that the probability is so low that even the law tells you not to worry – well, you ruined their plans for nothing.

As you’re making these considerations, are you being hyper-rational or paranoid? You don’t know anymore.

The morally imperfect solutions of second-degree contacts

When you reach the stage in which you’re not sure if you’re a clueless super-spreader or delusional, there are two ways to go. First, you can let yourself be overwhelmed by this endless chain of moral considerations, and spread chaos and panic. You tell everyone, better safe than sorry. You will only feel stupid when you’ll think of this in hindsight, and your friends will hate you for ruining their plans for a false alarm.

Second, you can put a limit to your own rumination, and (commonsensically) appeal to the law,, which is probably one of the reasons why human beings created it in the first place: to reduce the complexity of morality. You don’t have to be confined for a week!

Ethical perspectives for second-degree contacts, or why a little deontology wouldn’t hurt

In philosophy, two important ethical perspectives are consequentialism and deontology. Consequentialists say that what matters about your moral choices is their consequences in the real world. In some versions of consequentialism, for your choice to qualify as morally good, it should create a maximal amount of happiness.

As for deontological ethics, moral actions themselves are the only thing that should be evaluated, regardless of the consequences they create. According to 18th century philosopher Kant for instance, there are certain moral laws that no human being, in whatever context, should disregard.

I think most people intuitively follow consequentialist patterns of moral thinking. They would consider the situation they find themselves in, carefully choosing the best course of action according to the consequences it leads to. I believe consequentialism is superior to deontology because it’s more flexible and therefore fits well a large spectrum of morally demanding situations.

However, consequentialist thinking, because it’s not principled, but flexible and context-based, can easily lead to moral dilemmas or even paranoia. When morality is linked to subtle games of probability, as it is the case with Covid, consequentialist thinking can make your moral compass go haywire. Covid did make us think more probabilistically. There are few mathematical certainties in our world, so probability was always there - but we weren’t used to thinking probabilistically when doing everyday things such as sitting next to a coughing individual or shaking a hand.

As we get used to thinking probabilistically, our consequentialist thinking also improves, it becomes more accurate...or at least, more intricate, for those of us who aren’t statisticians. In times of a pandemic, even if laws often don’t equal morality, it may be a good idea to turn to deontology, for the sake of our peace of mind, and endorse more straightforward rules that don’t pain us with chains of consequentialist thoughts.