Sandel explores ethics of what we owe each other in a pandemic
Wearing a mask and social distancing are two important barriers to COVID-19 infection, public health experts and government officials say. But adoption of the seemingly simple precautions has become a cultural battleground in a country where individual rights have long been considered part of the nation’s founding ethos. And yet, what do we owe our fellow citizens in the age of a deadly virus with no vaccine that has already taken close to 170,000 lives, and will likely take thousands, and potentially hundreds of thousands, more? In his popular course “Justice,” Michael Sandel, Harvard’s Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government, regularly asks his students to take on such thorny ethical questions. He will do so again this fall with his new class, “Justice: Ethics in an Age of Pandemic and Racial Reckoning.” The Gazette recently asked Sandel for his thoughts on the subject. Q&A Michael Sandel GAZETTE: So many people...