How to keep ethics alive during the coronavirus pandemic
This is part of our Coronavirus Update series in which Harvard specialists in epidemiology, infectious disease, economics, politics, and other disciplines offer insights into what the latest developments in the COVID-19 outbreak may bring. With life-and-death issues of health and medicine foremost in our minds, ethics can get short shrift. To bring them to the public eye, the Edmund J. Safra Center for Ethics has issued the COVID-19 Rapid Response Impact Initiative, a series of white papers from some 40 thinkers on issues of justice, values, and civil liberties designed to inform policymakers during the crisis. “Integrated policymaking recognizes that really hard problems typically need to combine multiple kinds of expertise,” said Safra Center Director Danielle Allen. “The challenge is how to integrate different kinds of expertise.” While peer-reviewed publications can quickly publish and share work by the medical and scientific communities, too often ethics and the social sciences get only scattered articles...