More important than ending up on the wrong side of truth is the risk of destroying or defusing the *agonism* between the parties involved (Blok, 2019; Mouffe, 2005; Paxton, 2020). Agonism refers to the adversarial relationship between individuals (or groups) who see each other as opponents but acknowledge their legitimacy in participating in opposition. Some prototypical examples: boxers in a ring are in a state of agonism; political parties in a parliament are, *de jure*, in a state of agonism. But agonism can 'decay' into a state of *antagonism* where the parties see each other not as adversaries but as enemies, meaning that one party allegedly defends the home base legitimately. In contrast, the other is the illegitimate intruder (in our case, mainstream Science defends truth legitimately while conspiracists are the illegitimate purveyors of fake news). The antagonistic relationship is characterised by division and fundamental distrust, usually maintained on both sides. Unlike adversaries, enemies are not just *different* claimants at the throne of reigning consensus; they constitute *the other* who needs to be eliminated from the prevailing consensus. It should be mentioned that pluralists recognise that antagonism is "ineradicable", meaning there will always be insiders and outsiders relative to a particular symbolic line surrounding groups, institutions, societies, nations etc. Our fundamental political duty is to fnd democratic orders through agonism despite this underlying remnant of antagonism (Mouffe, 2005).

### **Responding to Confict: Monism Versus Pluralism**

The philosophy of pluralism has direct implications for our approach to the confict between conspiracists and mainstream science. Monism prescribes that those engaged in confict – both representing the reigning consensus and contesters – must follow the rules derived from this one overarching good. In our case, people engaged in a confict about a conspiracy theory must follow the rule of Reason, and they must do so without deviant ("irrational") discussion tricks or fallacies (Hansen & Pinto, 1995). Pluralists appreciate this but point out that being reasonable is not just a matter of avoiding fallacies but also resisting the temptation to view the confict as "a crisis produced by our adversary's stupidity, wickedness, or perversity" (Kekes, 1993, p. 24). Furthermore, avoiding fallacies is not the same as recognizing the other as a legitimate adversary, that the parties seek the origin of the confict, that they respect each other's identity etc. Being reasonable in this monist sense applies only to the parties' behaviour *within* the discussion whereas, as explained above, the pluralist urges us to look 'above' the discussion to the origin and the effects of that discussion on the parties' relationship.

By taking the larger view suggested by conceptions of a good life or by traditions, we come to see the confict at hand in a different light. We shall not merely ask: what should we do here and now? We shall ask instead: what should we do here and now so that we could resolve this confict in a way that would be best from the point of view of the system of values we, as disputants, share? And if we are reasonable, we shall answer by stepping back from the immediacy of the confict in which we participate in order to refect on what would be best not here and now but in the long run, given the values of our tradition or our conception of a good life (Kekes, 1993, p. 25).

A pluralist approach to confict means that the monist concept of a reasonable discussion (alignment with reason) becomes just one of the many ideals animating the discussion. It does so to maintain agonism and with an eye for the basic values shared by the parties involved.

The reader will have gathered from the above that a pluralist approach to confict is not a ready-made method for confict *resolution*. To be a pluralist about confict is not to follow a particular method towards resolution, nor does it involve any particular longing for resolution. Instead, it focuses on responsiveness towards others – particularly those who have a worldview that differs from yours radically (Blok, 2019). It also involves interpreting what is happening – confict – in a different way, not as a clash between someone who is right and someone who is wrong, or between someone who is informed and the other who is misinformed, but rather as a dialogue between two different, and possibly incompatible, identities (Kekes, 1993). Instead of 'fact checking' and 'fallacy fnding' and 'debunking', the pluralist looks at the other as formulating an ethical demand in such a way that a response does not annul any of the identities engaged in the dialogue.

### **6.4 Monism in Policy Responses to COVID-19 Conspiracism**

The European Commission and national governments within the European Union,2 the World Health Organization3 , and social media organisations such as Twitter4 and Facebook5 have responded to the identifed threat of COVID-19 conspiracism in remarkably similar ways. Yet, despite their difference in origin and feld of application, what unites these policies is their *monism*. What does this mean? For illustration, we will take a closer look at the policy advised by the European Commission concerning conspiracism. The monist features illustrated here are the following:

A frst feature is that the policy is cast in a rationalistic mould of truth-fnding, factchecking, debunking, fallacy identifcation, evidence testing, refutation and the like. Truth is the name of the game, and conspiracists are the ones losing. As examples of a discourse of rationalistic orientation, consider the italicised passages in the quotes below:

Conspiracies […] require to strengthen the commitment of the whole society, including competent authorities, media, journalists, fact-checkers, civil society and online platforms, and include, for example, *prompt debunking, demotion, possible removal or action against accounts* ("Tackling COVID-19 disinformation – getting the facts right", 2020)

DEBUNKING – *Facts and logic* matter ("Identifying conspiracy theories", 2021)

Of course, conspiracists also speak of truth and facts, but their orientation towards these rationalistic values is misguided. For example, consider the scare quotes around the term 'evidence' in the frst quote below and the subtle addition of the adjective 'scientifc' in the following quote:

Conspiracy theories have these 6 things in common: (1) An alleged, secret plot.; (2) A group of conspirators; (3) *'Evidence'* that seems to support the conspiracy theory; (4) They falsely suggest that nothing happens by accident and that there are no coincidences; nothing is as it appears and everything is connected; (5) They divide the world into good or bad; (6) They scapegoat people and groups. ("Identifying conspiracy theories", 2021)

Be careful, conspiracy theories are deceptive: they *ignore scientifc evidence and falsely blame individuals and groups that are not responsible for the pandemic* ("Identifying conspiracy theories", 2021)

The game is designed as a process of error elimination and thus is organised around the application of Reason to human affairs. Conspiracists are

2 https://ec.europa.eu/info/live-work-travel-eu/coronavirus-response/fghting-disinformation\_en 3 https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/fghting-misinformation-in-the-time-of-covid-19-

one-click-at-a-time

4 https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/medical-misinformation-policy

5 https://www.facebook.com/formedia/blog/working-to-stop-misinformation-and-false-news

A second feature, compatible with the rationalist orientation identifed above, is the inclination to work with a *binary representation* of the discourse space in which the confict occurs. Claims are either true or false, facts are opposed to non-facts, and standpoints are either 'in' or 'out'. There is very little wiggle room. Evidential support does not come in degrees. Individuals are either on the right side of the story, or they are hopelessly mistaken. Some examples are highlighted with italics below:

Information circulating includes *dangerous hoaxes and misleading healthcare information*, with *false claims* (such as 'it does not help to wash your hands' or 'the Coronavirus is only a danger to the elderly'). Such content is not necessarily illegal but can directly endanger lives and severely undermine efforts to contain the pandemic ("Fighting disinformation", 2021)

To address this trend, the European Commission and UNESCO are publicising a set of ten educational infographics helping citizens identify, *debunk* and *counter* conspiracy theories. ("Identifying conspiracy theories", 2021)

[On a section dedicated to journalists:] Emphasise *core facts, not conspiracy theories* in headlines; Reinforce core facts in the main text, using verifed information ("Identifying conspiracy theories", 2021)

A third feature is that conspiracists attacking the existing consensus are not just epistemically wrong; they are *morally* wrong. This is generally because conspiracists destabilise and endanger the application of the rational solution to the problem. Conspiracy theories are morally blameable barriers concerning public goals such as health, safety, truth, trust etc. Particularly telling in this regard is the term 'infodemic', a portmanteau of information and pandemic (or epidemic), coined in the early 2000s during the SARS outbreaks. The term has been widely used for the COVID-19 conspiracism and more generally for spreading false information on various aspects of the pandemic. The World Health Organization went further and organised the "1st WHO Infodemiology Conference".6 The semantics leave no room for ambiguity as to the interpretation of the term: false information is to truth what the viruses are to human health. For example:

Conspiracy theories that may endanger human health, harm the cohesion of our societies and may lead to public violence and create social unrest (for example conspiracies and myths about 5G installations spreading COVID-19 and leading to attacks on masts, or about a particular ethnic or religious group being at the origin of the spread of COVID-19, such as the worrying rise in COVID-19 related anti-Semitic content) ("Tackling COVID-19 disinformation – getting the facts right", 2020)

At times, a second layer of moral culpability can be discerned. For example, conspiracy groups appear in mainstream discourse to share many of the traits we, in fact, associate with conspirators (see Sect. 6.2). This is quite ironic because conspiracists are seen as blameworthy precisely for thinking that others are forming a conspiracy. And yet, their behaviour is described as "coordinated manipulative behaviour":

6 https://www.who.int/teams/risk-communication/infodemic-management/1st-who-infodemiologyconference

Platforms need to *curb coordinated manipulative behaviour* and increase transparency around malign infuence operations. ("Tackling COVID-19 disinformation – getting the facts right", 2020)

We want to highlight a fnal feature that the monist policy response makes an effort to appear as a pluralist response that allows counter-claims and open discussion. Compared to the previous three, this last feature is more diffcult to identify because we must distinguish between the spirit of the policy and its letter. The former is monist even when the latter is pluralist. Yet it stands to reason, we think, that after conspiracists are associated with 'misinformation', 'false news', 'manipulative behaviour', 'infodemic' and the like, the following are nothing but lip service appearing at the end to maintain a tolerant appearance:

All of the above remedies should be implemented in full respect of fundamental rights, in particular freedom of expression ("Tackling COVID-19 disinformation – getting the facts right", 2020)

So, what can you do? Encourage open debate and questions; Ask detailed questions about their theory in order to trigger self-refection. […] Don't ridicule. Try to understand why they believe what they believe. ("Identifying conspiracy theories", 2021)

After several infographics portraying conspiracism as outsiders who do not share mainstream standards of science and evidence, we cannot help thinking the advice is vacuous.

### **6.5 A Pluralist Alternative within Responsible Innovation?**

Is it possible to approach the confict between science and conspiracists from a pluralist perspective within the feld of responsible innovation, and, if so, what would this response look like? First, we will argue that a pluralist response is possible within responsible innovation and, in fact, expected on moral and practical grounds that have spurred the feld in the frst place. Then we will show that a pluralist response to conspiracism can start by negating the four features of monism illustrated above.

That the feld of responsible innovation is committed to some form of pluralism can be deduced both from its kinship with constructivist approaches to science such as STS and ethics of technology (Owen et al., 2013) and its aforementioned commitment to activate silent and critical publics. The pluralist suggestions advanced here will also not be strange to those who, standing on the shoulders of Weber, Berger and Latour, are quick to affrm that science is socially constructed, and thus facts are subject to discussion. And as already mentioned, the advice to turn our engagement machinery toward hard critics of science has been voiced in various ways since the feld's inception (Felt & Fochler, 2010; Goodin & Dryzek, 2006; Selin et al., 2017; Wynne, 2007). Without these critical publics, including stakeholders already part of a reigning consensus would be nothing more than a selffulflling prophecy. The participatory process would only confrm pre-existing

assumptions regarding the scientifc process or product under discussion. Including critical voices is not just a good idea it is the choice that confers meaning to the inclusion process in the frst place.

Has the feld of responsible innovation lived up to the promise of including critics? It has to some degree, but practitioners seem primarily focused on what might be called *mild* critical sentiments. The resulting conficts are moderate both in their force and in their effects. From selecting stakeholders to the actual involvement exercises, the process is shielded against deep disagreements between fundamentally different worldviews and interruption of already established pathways (Blok, 2019). It is sometimes said that stakeholders brought together in the dialogue on innovation must exhibit 'optimum cognitive distance' (Cuppen, 2012; Nooteboom et al., 2007). The participatory process can, in other words, be 'spoiled' if the invited stakeholders are too far away from each other (cognitively speaking). But the hypothesis of optimal cognitive distance is, in fact, developed with an eye on the company and/or group performance (Nooteboom et al., 2007). Optimal cognitive distance is needed for a group to perform well, but it can hardly be claimed that 'group performance' is the aim of participatory exercises. If the objective of the participatory game is to place a particular innovation process in context, to enrich the spectrum of perspectives on it, to broaden the central narrative around this process – in short, if responsible innovation is about *diversity* and not effciency, then the requirement of optimal cognitive distance does not seem to apply. Indeed, the feld of responsible innovation might be morally committed to seeking *maximum* cognitive distance: the parties should be just about as different as they can be (while still being part of the same world, morally speaking) in order to ensure diversity of views.

Conspiracists constitute precisely this faraway group towards which the feld of responsible innovation seems committed to be responsive. But, of course, both overinclusion (including conspiracists when it is better not to) and under-inclusion (not including conspiracists when it is better to include them) remain risks in the process. Keeping these risks in mind, we must ask whether a pluralist response to COVID-19 conspiracism can be formulated and what a pluralist response would look like. Given the four aspects highlighted in the previous section, we can formulate a provisional answer to the question: a pluralist response would amount to a negation of the four monist features identifed above.

The frst aspect illustrated was the rationalist narrative in which the policy response was framed. The policy exemplifes what following Blok (2019) was referred to as a 'cognitive response' to the appearance of the Other – a response that emphasises the cognitive dimension of the confict. The policy is concentrated exclusively on facts, evidence, science etc., effectively promoting the value of truth as standing above others. A pluralist approach would not deny the importance of truth but would highlight the importance of other values, social obligations and institutions. Matters of happiness, virtues, social cohesion, justice, freedom, institutional trust, citizenship, and many more can come into play in the discussion on the COVID-19 pandemic without any one of these functioning as the central point to which all others converge.

In practice, the responsible innovation scholar would seek to create moments of interaction where all these alternative narratives can be unfolded and brought into a relationship with one another. These would be neither debunking sessions nor debates; the interaction would not be a rationalist exchange of arguments, although, of course, factuality and truth are not to be excluded from the discussion altogether. The pluralist policy or intervention can compensate for the apparent difference in authority and social status between scientists and their interlocutors. Even when the scientifc community is on the right side of the argument (and there is a reigning consensus on the 'facts of the matter'), the factual aspects are but one dimension of the relationship between conspiracists and the group representing the mainstream consensus. By selecting stakeholders, topics, and interaction formats, the responsible innovation scholar can bring into practice the multi-dimensionality that a complex problem (such as a world pandemic) deserves. The conspiracists might still be wrong in the end; the scientists might still be correct. But the pluralist engagement exercise need not revolve exclusively around this one Archimedean point.

The second observed aspect is the binary representation of truth: claims are either true or false. Perhaps logical and mathematical truth must remain binary in this sense (although many-valued logics have been developed since the beginning of the 20th century). Nevertheless, the reality around complex or 'wicked' problems will resist such reduction. As Fuller puts it:

[…] fundamental to the governance of science as an 'open society' is the right to be wrong. This is an extension of the classical republican ideal that one is truly free to speak their mind only if they can speak with impunity. […] The underlying intuition of this social arrangement, which is the epistemological basis of Mill's *On Liberty*, is that people who are free to speak their minds as individuals are most likely to reach the truth collectively. […] In a post-truth world, this general line of thought is not merely endorsed but also intensifed (Fuller, 2018, p. 151)

Thus, even when it is true that the vaccine against COVID-19 reduces chances of hospitalization by a certain per cent, it is not clear that anything short of this statement will necessarily be false and must be discarded. After all, the statement needs to be qualifed in terms of age group, method of administration, sample rates, rare but possible side-effects, statistical accuracy, epistemic assumptions etc. These variables do not altogether change the acceptability of the vaccine as a solution. Still, they do create a moral obligation to understand the broader context within which statements about the vaccine are made. In the examples given above, we have seen that policy-makers are quick to throw in terms such as 'false' and 'fake'. Still, complex situations would perhaps be better tackled with notions that allow for degrees or at least the possibility of a spectrum. There are no such things as alternative facts, but people might be more or less in the right or the wrong, people might have more or less of a point (even *malgré eux*), people might make more robust or weaker testimonies, a solution might be more or less effcient etc. There are suffcient terminologies out there to understand facts incrementally, in terms of verisimilitude, rather than categorically, in binary terms of truth versus falsity.

The third aspect referred to above was portraying those outside the consensus as morally culpable for various reasons, e.g., slowing down the roll-out of public health measures and manipulating the weak. If conspiracists appear as enemies from a forgotten tribe that has not yet enjoyed the benefts of rationalist illumination, then surely there are very few ethical demands we share with such individuals. But conspiracists are generally speaking, born and educated in the same system that is now so adamantly making a case for their moral culpability. They are part of the same social media platforms as those who defend the reigning consensus and are just as free to reject some as bogus and accept some as facts. Conspiracists might not be on the right side of truth this time, but they share with us the value of truth and other values, which means that their ethical demand for responsiveness is still valid. What does it mean to be responsive to someone who is supposedly wrong? As explained in Sect. 6.3, the responsible innovation scholar can focus on fnding and formulating this common ground of core values and maintaining the agonism between the parties involved, i.e., portraying them as worthy adversaries. Argumentative discussions in various deliberative formats might be needed to fnd this common ground. Still, they would then function as tools for exploring the other party's views rather than testing them against the criterion of truth and Reason. The parties would debate *in order to* understand each other, not *because* they already understand each other and want to identify who's right and who's wrong.

The fourth aspect concerned the formal, tip-of-the-hat praises of pluralism and tolerance. In the current debate on COVID-19, conspiracism, pluralism, and diversity take the form of a forgotten remark at the end of an otherwise monist policy response. In this situation, the pluralist alternative would be to revert matters to their original pluralist state. In everyday life, everyone is ready to admit that there are various versions of the good life – that as a value, truth, and rationality stand alongside happiness, tradition, wealth, love, offce, creativity, freedom, family, and many other more values each with its own meaning and criterion of distribution (Walzer, 1983). A pluralist response would involve taking this plurality as a starting point for the discussion rather than adding it as a supplementary remark at the end.

### **6.6 Conclusion**

"The inclusion of stakeholders" is a phrase on many people's lips these days. The intellectual heritage of the feld of responsible innovation suggests that the feld is already animated to some extent by pluralism. But can this inclusive, tolerant attitude withstand the test of conspiracism? We believe it can, and we have contributed with suggestions on how this can be put into practice. In Table 6.1 below, we summarize the main differences between a monist and pluralist response to conspiracism.

**Table 6.1** Monism vs pluralism in response to conspiracism

The possibility of pluralism within the feld of responsible innovation shows that our ideal of stakeholder inclusion does not have to leave out conspiracists, despite their radical dissensus with mainstream institutions of science (either in general or concerning a particular innovation). This does not mean, of course, that a pluralist response to conspiracism, acceptable as it might be from a responsible innovation perspective, is always the best response. There are indeed limits to inclusion set by fundamental (constitutional) rights, what Isaiah Berlin called "the great goods", and conspiracists can forfeit their right to inclusion by going against those goods. But conspiracists *qua* conspiracists appear to be 'includable' if a pluralist philosophy underpins the inclusion process. From a monist perspective, conspiracists will appear as outsiders and might be kept afar under the assumption that their views are wrong or dangerous or, in some other sense, illicit. From a pluralist perspective, accepting conspiracism as a stakeholder group and being responsive to them does not mean accepting conspiracists theories as true (or, for that matter, as false). Instead, it means following the ideal of 'science *with and for society*' to its ultimate, if unexpected, consequences.

### **References**

Berlin, I. (1998). *The frst and the last*. New York Review of Books.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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### **Chapter 7 Values as Hypotheses and Messy Institutions: What Ethicists Can Learn from the COVID-19 Crisis**

**Udo Pesch**

### **7.1 Introduction**

The global crisis that emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic created profound moral challenges. The crisis forced us to think about what is really important concerning individual values and societal ones. For example, trade-offs needed to be made between the value of human life and the value of the economy. In addition, questions need to be answered about how society could deal with vulnerable people, how sick ones could die humanely, and how the deceased could be given a dignifed farewell (e.g. see Centrum voor Ethiek en Gezondheid, 2020).

The academic feld of ethics has contributed substantively to tackling these challenges regarding the evaluation of practices and policies and the determination of the correct values (Dartnell & Kish, 2021; Kim & Grady, 2020; Verweij et al., 2020). Such evaluations usually aim to clarify ongoing discussions about policy measures, by isolating the underlying problem from its political and societal contexts. This helps to understand the underlying moral structure of the problem at hand, but in many cases moral problems are created by the institutional arrangements set up to pursue public values and the workings of the public debate which determines these values. These closely related issues cannot be straightforwardly isolated from the practices and policies subjected to ethical evaluation.

To unpack this claim, we can look at the critical role of the division of modern society into a public and a private sphere. This division allows us to maintain personal values that guide individual choices, while a collective course can be determined based on the idea that there is a common ground which is based on shared values. The values that are to be shared are decided upon within deliberative processes that are based on 'public reason', in which individuals develop positions

© The Author(s) 2022 M. J. Dennis et al. (eds.), *Values for a Post-Pandemic Future*, Philosophy of Engineering and Technology 40, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08424-9\_7

U. Pesch (\*)

Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
based on their idea what is best for the social collective they are part of. With that, the separation between a public and a private sphere can be seen as a basic institutional structure, designating specifc rules and norms to different social contexts. This institutional structure encompasses a number of other institutions that allow a collective course to become effectuated, such as parliamentary democracy and government.

The COVID-19 crisis testifes that these institutions and the substantiation of public reason are not without problems. To start with, the state apparatus that has been developed to pursue public goals is often subject to bureaucratisation. For instance, the organisational processes that have been set up to distribute vaccines were so rigid that medicines had to be thrown away, leading to frustration among doctors, politicians, and the public (March, 2021). Moreover, in some cases, the rules that have been implemented to safeguard public health are now blamed for endangering public health.

The pursuit of public values is organised in national contexts, while COVID-19, following the globalised socio-economic system, is not restricted by any border (Ludovic et al., 2020). This, for instance, has meant that expats and tourists ended up in isolation, far away from friends and family, while having no opportunity to meet people in real life. It also meant that vaccines are spread unevenly worldwide, which opens the chance for new virus variants to develop in regions where vaccination rates are still low.

We can also have a look at the widespread distrust in the pharmaceutical industry. It is typical of this branch that it crosses the boundaries between the institutional realms of the state, the market, and science. These realms respectively pursue the public of healthcare, business enterprise, and creating new knowledge. Big pharma combines these goals, which creates moral concerns as companies make enormous profts due to novel medicine that the majority of the population needs to take to reduce the impact of the COVID-19 crisis. Moreover, the amount of fnancial gains makes the industry susceptible to critique and conspiracy thinking. After all, it will be in its interest to sell vaccines, even if they do not work effectively or may have adverse side effects.

It is also hard to recognize public reason in discussions that are held on social media like Twitter and Facebook in the shaping of a public discourse. These social media are often taken as a platform (or even *the* platform) that allows for a public debate. However, it is incorrect to assume that these media facilitate such a debate. Firstly, many activities are initiated by non-humans*,* such as bots that aim to distort the debate or organisations that seek to further organisational interests. As such, media do not allow individual citizens to the exchange their perspectives on what should be the 'public' interest. Instead, internet discussions tend to be partisan, skewed and distorted, contributing to further discontent and distrust (see Steinert, 2020).

Such developments contribute to the rise of a vocal group of people that do not want to be vaccinated or resist COVID-19 measures. Some voices even do not want to align with public reason in the frst place. There are political parties and protest groups that explicitly contest the legitimacy of political institutions to serve the public. As such, the very idea of a common ground is challenged, threatening our capacity to fnd shared values by public reason.

These examples show that the constitutive relation between institutional and public reason is subject to two problems. First, the boundary between publicness and privateness can be understood in a variety of ways, which may contribute to societal worries. Second, there is no straightforward way to establish shared values, as in reality this is rather a disorganised process in which the idea of a common ground cannot be taken for granted.

To deal with these issues, I will develop an approach in this chapter that allows the *translation* of ethical considerations into institutional arrangements and the *structuring* of societal processes that give rise to public opinion. At its core, this approach aims to bring politics and ethics more closely together than is currently the case in ethics and social research.

In this, I take the COVID-19 crisis as an episode that allows us to learn about the moral role that institutions play in safeguarding relevant values, while these institutions simultaneously both shape and are shaped by public deliberations. In other words, this chapter will not ask how ethics can help us cope with the COVID-19 crisis (which, without any reservations, is still a cardinal question), but it will reverse this question and ask what *ethics can learn* from the COVID-19 crisis.

This chapter proceeds in the following way. In Sect. 7.2, I will discuss the opposition between politics and ethics in ideal-typical terms. This opposition holds that there are two orientations: either values are fully *independent* from politics, as can be recognised, at least to some extent, in analytic ethics, or values are fully *dependent* on politics, which appears to be a common assumption within constructivist philosophy and social research. Both orientations are counterproductive as politics *and* morality play a crucial role in social life.

In Sect. 7.3, I will frst turn to ideas developed by John Dewey, Jürgen Habermas, and Charles Taylor to develop a more productive approach. Their ideas allow for an account in which values are not static and in which values are not isolated from politics or public discourse. However, in their work on deliberative democracy, these authors still seem to regard institutions as instrumental to the moral organisation of society. The conditions of deliberative democracy are mainly described as theoretical constructs, which goes to the extent of the attention for the volatility of the relation between values and institutions.

In Sect. 7.4, I will explore an approach that is able to understand the workings of institutions in such a way that they still allow for the pursuit of a society in which relevant values are safeguarded and pursued. This approach sees values as 'moral hypotheses' that are tested and substantiated in the institutions that characterise modernity. In other words, modern institutions allow us to fnd out what values mean in real-life contexts, potentially giving rise to demands to reconceptualise these values or adjust these institutions. At the same time, the moral problems caused by institutions themselves are not suffciently subjected to theoretical refection.

In the fnal section of this chapter, I will reiterate some of my central claims. I will restate their importance given other global challenges we are currently facing, with climate change being the most critical of these.

### **7.2 An Opposition Between Politics and Ethics**

In this section, I will depict an opposition between two orientations that are recognisable in the literature. On the one hand, there is 'analytic ethics', which appears to be the dominant approach to philosophy and ethics in academia (Bell et al., 2016). It is mainly within this approach that one can recognise the tendency to exclude politics as a relevant factor. Contrastingly, there is the approach developed by those that can be called 'deconstructivist' scholars where the independent status of moral issues is discarded.

It needs to be admitted that the description of this opposition has an ideal-typical nature; in real life, it is hard to pinpoint the analytical and deconstructivist orientations and most scholars entertain positions that are much more nuanced. Still, these orientations guide such scholars in their epistemological and methodological assumptions. Thus, they fgure as ideals that are not necessarily followed but may also fgure as the background against which alternative approaches are developed. One way of explaining the ideal-typical opposition between these two approaches is to refer to Kant's distinction between the analytical and synthetic a priori. While ethicists tend to position moral issues in the domain of the analytical a priori or take this as the starting point from which they deviate, the deconstructivist approach takes moral issues to belong to the synthetic a priori.1

Many analytic ethicists are concerned with the question of the universal and objective validity of moral claims. In this, the grounds that allow the justifcation of moral claims is widely contested (Roeser, 2005), giving rise to a variety of metaethical positions. What characterises most positions however is that 'moral truths' rely on their conceptual consistency and the eradication of contingent factors (cf. Erdur, 2016). Politics and power are among the most salient contingent factors. As such, they are non-essential phenomena that should not be considered to fnd out what is morally relevant (cf. Brink, 1989). Values are then easily perceived as unchangeable moral truths; in this, ethicists have taken up the task of discovering these (cf. Korsgaard, 2015). This means that discussions about the relevant values for specifc societal challenges lose their relevance for ethics. Another element of analytic ethics that plays a decisive role here is the focus on individual agents vis-à-vis society as a whole. Individuals are taken to be autonomous, having no

1My analysis is to a large extent based on academic experience in different scholarly felds. In the last two decades I have worked in policy studies, STS, and ethics of technology and I was often puzzled by the underlying normative assumptions of this felds, as these are usually not made explicit. The account of this section can be seen as an attempt to identify these assumptions, in which literature has been used to systemise these observations.

intrinsic moral connection with their communities (Pesch, 2020a). Again, there are many that authors do not maintain such far-reaching presumptions about the status of moral claims. However, it is rather typical that these authors explicitly contrast themselves with these 'realist' starting points in order to present their own arguments – showing the relevance of the orientation I sketched out here.

For the deconstructivist approach, politics and power fgure very much as its key concern. In this approach, the assumption that moral claims can be tested as if they were truth claims is disputed: moral claims are not considered to have objective status. Instead, they are derived from concrete social structures. This means that it cannot be expected that a moral claim will have the same status independent from time and place. The origins of this approach may be found in Nietzsche's work and are particularly recognisable in poststructuralist sociology, critical theory (Hoy, 2005) and STS (Sismondo, 2008). Starting point in all of these branches of research is that every truth is a human-made truth, with power structures, belief systems, and ingrained routines determining what is true and right. In other words, the question about what is true is a political question (Foucault, 1997). When claims are studied that are considered moral 'truths', one should not look at the content of these claims but at the social and political context within which these claims are made. Moral truths must be deconstructed to reveal which social conditions ensure that a particular morality is maintained as true.

The deconstructivist approach provides a sharp critical toolkit that might be used to identify those moral claims that are taken as moral truths. As such, moral wrongs could be discovered and, potentially, strategies to overcome these wrongs could be formulated. At the same time, however, the approach is *methodologically nihilistic*. The approach can be used to uncover moral wrongs, but it does not provide the tools to say why something is wrong and what can be done to make things right. Often this methodological nihilism spills over into moral relativism, which means that *no* moral system is deemed better than another because moral standards used to say that something is 'better' are also culturally embedded. Strategies to overcome moral wrongs then become senseless. Interestingly, research domains closest to the deconstructivist tradition such as critical theory, STS, and feminist studies have strong normative outlooks, endorsing justice and engagement of scholars (for instance see Mamo & Fishman, 2013), while genuinely nihilistic positions tend to spill over to felds such as policy sciences. In this feld, moral issues are often exclusively taken as mere stakeholders' input, meaning that this is empirical not normative information. It is telling that in policy sciences, politics is often portrayed as a 'game'(cf. Scharpf, 1997), a process that is considered amoral in itself. The game is played by actors who aim to optimize their goals that are perceived as subjective choices that need no further scrutiny.

But the fact that different value systems coexist (and that it cannot be stated which of those systems is better) does not imply that value systems in themselves have no value (Roeser, 2005). In the end, we cannot help being moral beings: *every* statement we make about how we relate to others is an inherently moral statement (also see Pesch, 2020). All our choices and assessments invoke normative qualifcations about what is 'better' or what is 'worse'. Moreover, we are communal beings, in which the political realm is where we can decide what we fnd important as a society, and it is also the realm that allows society to organise itself as a moral community (cf. Arendt, 1958). Politics *is* the organisation of ethics at the collective level.

Indeed, the COVID-19 crisis brings about a range of ethical choices that need to be settled collectively. It made clear that we do not live in a nihilistic universe; instead, we are apprehensive about older adults who die in an inhumane way − even if we do not know these people personally. Most of us have seem to have sacrifced our daily routines and our direct interests for the common good without hesitation (Lynch & Khoo, 2020). It shows that humans have the innate quality to help out people in need (Warneken & Tomasello, 2006). Also those who fall outside every risk group know how to empathise with the victims, their families and the care providers, testifying the claim that empathy is a key driver for human behaviour (De Waal, 2006; Tomasello et al., 2005). Having said that, the pandemic is in its very nature a 'collective action' problem (Harring et al., 2021): the ethical questions that are brought about by COVID-19 cannot be solved by the aggregate of individual reactions. This raises the question of how society can organise itself to make collective choices in the face of a pandemic. What are the conditions that permit politics to focus on the values that we collectively consider to be important?

To answer this question, it is necessary to see what relevant values are and to understand how these can be substantiated in practical arrangements. Here I start with the Dewey's pragmatist approach to values, which allows a non-static account of values that can be straightforwardly embedded within the idea of deliberative democracy. However, as I will explain below, theories on deliberative democracy tend to underplay the complexity of institutional arrangements: while values are not seen as static any longer, institutions still are. To overcome this problem, it is vital to be able to critically deconstruct the workings of institutions to see whether institutions can deliver their intended functions. After all, they should be adjusted if they do not do so.

### **7.3 Values and Deliberative Democracy**

To allow the connection of values and politics, I will frst turn to *deliberative democracy*, which can be seen as the political shape that will enable us to say something about how we want to live together, by determining the values that we fnd worth pursuing as a collective. In this, we can understand values as the following: values inform the *understandings* that allow people to make sense of social phenomena to make decisions in anticipation of future events (Dewey, 1922, 1927). This account of values assumes that humans constantly judge what to do next by interpreting situations in terms of whether they are desirable or undesirable. Values give normative signifcance to a broader range of experiences and projections. They can be considered concepts that *aggregate* a variety of impressions that allow agents to prepare for future actions (Habermas, 1985; Rawls, 1997). As a higher-order categorisation of meanings, values *can be made explicit*, enabling them to be the basis for

collective deliberation and decision-making processes. It is the fact that values can be made explicit that allows the *deliberate organisation of society*, facilitating discussions about collective courses of action. In other words, the explication of values and the deliberation on their prioritisation provides effective and legitimate forms of collaborative decision making.

This is done by enacting public reason, individuals in their capacity as citizens engage in deliberation about what is good for society as a whole (Habermas, 1985; Rawls, 1997). Thus, individuals imagine themselves as part of a greater whole, members of a public, which motivates them to contribute to discussions about the greater good. Subsequently, the outcomes of these discussions are taken as guidance to establish and adjust institutions, which ensures that these institutions are responsive to society (cf. Taylor 2002). In other words, by making values explicit and turning them into objects of collective refection, we can make justify them according to moral standards that, likewise, have been subjected to collective scrutiny and deliberation.

The deliberative organisation of society is mainly done by erecting the relevant institutions and institutional domains. These institutions and domains compartmentalise social reality into different social contexts in which specifc rules are maintained. They allow society to structure itself according to the right moral standards so that essential values can be maintained and pursued within social collectives.

Maybe the most basic compartmentalisation is the separation of social reality into a public and a private sphere. This construction of a boundary between these two spheres allows for both 'negative' and 'positive' freedom (see Berlin, 1969). While negative freedom is secured by installing a private sphere in which an individual is not restricted by others in her activities; positive freedom', understood as the freedom for collective self-determination, is pursued by the establishment of a public sphere in which members of a society can settle on a collective course by political action. Political theory presents the strict division into a public and private sphere as the way to overcome the problem of *value pluralism*, which is an elementary problem for democracy because even if there is consensus about the prominence of certain values, individual persons will diverge in their assessment of the relative importance between them and their understandings of these values. As authors like Jürgen Habermas (1996), John Rawls (2009), and Richard Rorty (1989) maintained, the public sphere allows for a common ground at the collective level, while individuals are entitled to their own sets of moral preferences in the private sphere.

The COVID-19 pandemic shows that the boundary between the public and private sphere is far from unequivocal. While a majority of people in developed countries comply with governmental measures, such as lock-downs and vaccination programmes, a minority opposes these measures, sometimes in very vocal ways. To a signifcant extent, this opposition is the result of people who contest the boundary that is drawn between the private sphere and the public sphere plays, but it is also the result of the indiscriminate use of different conceptions of this boundary.

Negative freedom informs a frst conception of the public/private distinction in which the private sphere allows for choices about how to live, where to go, with whom to interact. We use this freedom to shape who we are, to constitute our personal identity. Public authorities may enforce laws and policies that ensure justice and well-being, but challenging the liberty to shape one's identity is not acceptable in any democracy. Opponents to corona-related measures as lockdowns perceive these measures to form (or threaten to form) such a challenge.

However, one may also recognize other conceptions of the public/private boundary that play a role in the societal controversies concerning COVID-19. An epidemic challenges the boundaries between individual and collective in a physical manner. This is especially relevant, as the integrity of the individual body can be said to be the epitome of the private sphere: the core of privacy is that we aim to hide uncontrollable bodily functions from the sight others (Moore, 1985; Pesch, 2015). In fact, this physical understanding of the public/private boundary that revolves around autonomy, control and dignity underlies the political understanding that pertains to freedom. A virus invades the individual body without respecting its integrity at all, but it does not challenge our understanding of the public/private boundary because of its invisibility. The injection of a vaccine however clearly breaches the boundary between what is inside and what is outside of the body. Only other people in whom we have special relation, our family or trusted professionals such as doctors, are allowed to cross this boundary. Even though in the case of COVID-19, the integrity of the body is compromised by medical specialists, this action is still commissioned by the government, which ought to refrain itself from intervening in the private sphere of the body.

This bodily connotation of privateness and publicness transfers into an informational connotation. Just like we need to keep control over our bodily processes, in the sense that we hide these processes from the sights of others (Geuss, 2001), we also need control over what others know about us. Debates about data privacy are derived from this need to keep things secret. Apps that track the movements of people or that show whether a person is vaccinated or not, may violate this need.2 Especially as the combination of different data streams may be used to construct a profle a person, severely reducing the ability of that person to control what she wants to keep secret.

Publicness and privateness not only pertain to the relation between an individual and a social collective, this conceptual pair is also used to separate institutional domains that allow us to categorise roles of individuals and organisations. For instance, the market domain is portrayed as a private domain as well, which grants businesses and consumers the freedom to pursue their preferences by exchange goods and services for money. Measures to reduce the number of human contacts in public places precisely target private enterprises as stores, restaurants, or music venues are closed, challenging the freedom that characterises the market as a private domain. Moreover, representatives of these enterprises feel that they are now responsible for solving a problem for which they are not responsible: they have not

2 https://www.aldeparty.eu/corona\_dictatorship\_watchdog, accessed on 10-12-2021.

caused the pandemic and they are not the designated party to do something about it; this is considered a task for the government or individuals.

The idea of bodily integrity also plays a role on another level. A nation is often portrayed as a 'body' that needs to be protected against invasive forces. The metaphor of viruses and disease is often used, and mostly abused, to demonise and exclude strangers (Bauman, 2013). In the case of COVID-19, we are dealing with a real virus of which the spread is not restrained by the borders of a nation, just like the virus is not restrained by the boundaries of the human body. Reactions to fght the virus predominantly have a domestic character and there seems to be a lack of international coordination. There is no global public sphere that allows for collective self-determination, instead there are organisation such as the World Health Organization (WHO), which are very much confned by national interests and outlooks (Davies & Wenham, 2020).

Individuals appear to have many reasons not to get vaccinated controversies (Murphy et al., 2021), which may pertain to the different conceptions of the public/ private boundary levels. In the end, this boundary is so elusive that it is untenable to maintain a neat separation into two spheres (cf. Benn & Gaus, 1983; Weintraub, 1997). Another related problem that can be recognised in discussions about coronarelated measures is that there is no 'agreement to disagree', a principle that can be seen as the foundation of deliberative democracy. Not only the legitimacy of public authorities is disputed by some, with populist leaders and protestors speaking of dictatorship and even genocide,3 also the very idea that we share the same reality appears to be disputed as Bruno Latour argued (2013). Latour wrote about climate change, but his words also match the refutations of scientifc fndings about the existence or seriousness of the coronavirus (Hartwell & Devinney, 2021).

What these examples derived from the COVID-19 crisis show is that values can mean different things between different social contexts, but even they can mean different things *within* a singular context. Moreover, these meanings can always be subjected to societal contestation. This is illustrated by many faces of the public/ private boundary that play a role in debates about corona-measures. This boundary outlines a compartmentalisation into different institutional spheres that allow certain values to be pursued, however, this boundary can be drawn in a variety of ways, invoking different understandings of values. The articulation of values via public reason can be taken as a theoretical construct that fgures as a normative ideal that guides the further development of the institutions that support deliberative democracy, but to take further steps in de development of deliberative democracy, the black-box institutions need to be opened.

3E.g. https://www.rf.fr/en/france/20210715-down-with-dictatorship-anger-at-france-s-sweeping-newcovid-rules-macron-vaccination-yellow-vests; https://theconversation.com/bolsonaro-faces-crimesagainst-humanity-charge-over-covid-19-mishandling-5-essential-reads-170332 accessed on 18-11-2021.

### **7.4 An Enlightened Moral Project and Messy Institutions**

This section will propose a tentative approach that integrates the attention for values, institutions, and public deliberation. This approach begins by acknowledging the cardinal role of public values developed and entertained in deliberative processes, and then proceeds by acknowledges the conditionality of institutional developments.

Indeed, processes of deliberation should not be seen as isolated from the *institutions* that support them. The institutions developed in modernity embody and reproduce certain values that cannot be discarded if one wants to maintain democracy. Political institutions such as parliamentary democracy, the legal system, and public administration, and the non-political institutions of the capitalist market and modern science to facilitate values like autonomy, freedom, justice, dignity, well-being, and progress in a myriad of ways. For instance, we can see how freedom is shaped differently in a political or in an economic context: while parliamentary democracy allows for political freedom by giving citizens the right to vote, to join a political party, to run for offce, etc., the capitalist market allows for economic freedom by giving consumers the right to buy the products or services they prefer.

As such, institutions fgure as the vehicle with which society has been organised to enable collective processes of moral deliberation. To underpin my analysis, I'd like to portray the modern era that emerged with the Enlightenment here as a 'moral project': the collective attempt to actively shape the world according to given moral hypotheses. This moral project revolves around the establishment and further adjustment of institutions, which can be defned as societal contexts in which given sets of rules guide collective action. Values can be taken as 'moral hypotheses', they evolve from public deliberation and then are further articulated and tested within institutions. Institutions allows us to fnd out what a value actually means within a certain setting.

In this, an ongoing dialectical relation can be recognised: on the one hand, the right institutions are set up following collective deliberation; on the other hand, the capacity for public reason is nurtured by setting up the right institutions. Over the course of the Enlightened moral project, a patchwork of institutions has been development that have led to the compartmentalisation of society into different contexts that secure and further shape certain values. The further evolution of this patchwork of institutions is characterised by dynamics that play out within and between institutions. These dynamics are messy and they have a major impact on the further substantiation of values, compromising the capacity of institutions to test values as hypotheses.

A frst issue is that institutions tend to create specifc path-dependencies, most notably the rules that characterise an institution often come to form a reality on their own. This process of bureaucratisation means that goals are 'displaced', and rules that have been set up to safeguard certain values may become ends in themselves (Merton, 1940). Also in the context of corona-measures processes of goals displacement might become a reality, for instance when tracing apps will continue to be used after the end of the pandemic to serve other goals, such as surveillance. But such processes of goal displacement may also be traced at the level of institutional domains (Pesch, 2014), which give rise to societal distrust. For instance, looking at the political domain, we see how political parties have become subject to Michels's iron rule of oligarchy (Michels, 2019); politicians are recruited from a narrow societal segment and stick to party discipline. Political agendas are to a large extent set by media hypes and lobbyists pursuing a specifc interest (Lowi, 1969)). Also in the market domain, a decline of responsiveness to its original goal can be observed. Companies – especially the larger ones – are often more reactive to the wishes of shareholders than to the wishes directly expressed by consumers or groups of consumers, so that the freedom of individual consumers to pursue their self-interest is seriously obstructed (Galbraith, 1998; Mazzucato, 2018). Likewise, the domain of science reveals patterns of institutional goal displacement, for instance in case of the emphasis on quality measures such as impact factors and past track record, which brings about certain problems, such as the hampering of scientifc activities that do not belong to the dominant paradigms (Macdonald & Kam, 2007).

The second issue is that the *boundaries* between institutions are usually illdefned. At these boundaries, there are continuous negotiations about which rules are valid on which occasions. For example, one can think of the boundary between political decision-making and science-based expertise (also see Lindblom & Cohen, 1979). The demands for accurate science and effective democratic decisions may be conficting. What counts as 'good' science may not be 'good' decisions and vice versa. Workable solutions are established, but these solutions are temporary and conditional (Gieryn, 1983; cf. Jasanoff, 1990). In Dutch policy-making, sciencebased knowledge is coordinated by the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) (Pesch et al., 2012). This 'boundary organisation' gathers scientists and medical expertise and gives advices to the government.4 A frst problem is that an ongoing pandemic brings about many questions that cannot be answered yet by science. As the advice given is based on knowledge that is incomplete it can easily be contested by other scientists. In the Dutch debate, alternative interpretations were quickly distributed via traditional and social media. The proliferation of such interpretations appeared to have undermined the credibility of the advice and eventually also the measures that are taken. A second problem is RIVM has been accused by other scientists, politicians, and by the general public that is was doing politics instead of science, by being too close to the policy domain.5 A third problem is that science-based knowledge, even if it is complete, cannot serve as the exclusive ground for political decisions, as these have a moral and not a factual character. In the end, the government has to determine which measures have to be taken, by making trade-offs between competing values in a situation that is highly uncertain. As Prime Minister Mark Rutte expressed: "In crises like these, you

4 https://www.rivm.nl/coronavirus-covid-19/omt, accessed on 20-11-2021

5For instance see, https://www.medischcontact.nl/nieuws/laatste-nieuws/artikel/kritische-hoogleraren-vinden-de-wetenschappelijke-basis-van-coronamaatregelen-onhelder.htm, accessed on 20-11-2021

have to take 100% of the decisions with 50% of the knowledge and bear the consequences of these decisions".6

The variety of institutions brings about a compartmentalised social life granting certain roles to actors who represent certain institutions, but in a situation that is as complex as COVID-19, this compartmentalisation cannot be maintained. Scientifc experts are asked to give advice on the political decisions that need to be taken. We allow doctors to intervene with our bodily integrity, but vaccination programmes have to be incited by government. Pharmaceutical industry needs to have to have the incentives to innovate that of a competitive market provides, so the appropriate medicine is developed. The mixture of activities from different institutional domains raises discontent, but it a discontent that we have to accept in order to address major societal challenges. In the end, there is no singular solution to these problems, science and politics are institutions that serve their own values and have their own rules and bringing them together will inevitably give rise to contestation.

The assignment for theorists of deliberative democracy is not to fnd out the conditions that would give rise to full consensus about the status of values or to create arrangements that are 'perfect' in theory. The take on values as hypotheses shows that institutions are contexts that allow for *moral learning*, for ways of fnding out what values mean or can mean in specifc contexts. In this, societal confict can be seen as a necessary source of information (Cuppen, 2018; Rip, 1986), it shows whether values substantiated in institutions align with societal specifcations of these values. It is further input of a messy deliberative process that may give rise to the adjustment of institutions (Callon, 1998; Pesch, 2021). By all means, COVID-19 has given rise to a global crisis, but it is not necessarily a democratic crisis (Walby, 2021). Because of the limitations of time, societal debates are heated, chaotic and sometimes nasty, but it we accept them as learning opportunities, then we can use them to move forwards. This does not mean that we should accept nor underestimate active attempts to cause a rift in the idea of a common moral ground or a shared reality as undertaken by some populist leaders. Such attempts are no mere expressions of the freedom of speech or the freedom to have political preferences; on the contrary, they threaten these freedoms as they aim to undermine the democratic institutions that serve them.

### **7.5 What Can Ethics Learn from the COVID-19 Crisis?**

Let me use this fnal section to recap the central claims that have been made in this chapter. This chapter proposed values as concepts with which we give a multitude of situations moral signifcance, with which we can determine whether we fnd something good or bad, and with which we can compare certain conditions in

6 https://nos.nl/video/2326873-rutte-we-hebben-iedereen-nodig-17-miljoen-mensen, accessed on 20-11-2021

normative terms. Specifying a value is not an end in itself but guides actions and choices. A value is an evaluation that motivates an action or an intervention. This means that an ethical analysis must not only determine whether something is 'right' or 'wrong', but especially *how* it can be improved. It concerns the identifcation of alternative options for action and the exploration of the consequences of those options. Indeed, values can be seen as conceptual means to organise our lives morally – either at the individual level or at the level of the social collective.

In this, deliberative democracy appears to be the most suitable form for the moral organisation of social collectives. At the same time, it needs to be acknowledged that decision-making processes within deliberative democracy are messy. The institutions set up to serve and protect us are not without problems, and they should constantly be subjected to reconsideration and redesign. Ethics can nurture the dialectical relation between institutions and values by forwarding and fne-tuning the moral hypotheses about how specifc understandings of values can be secured in real-life institutions. Here, deconstructivist methods – dropping their nihilism – can be applied, not to denounce the reality of values but to unravel moral claims with which further moral refnement can be pursued. Also, we have to have more thorough accounts of how societal contestation can be used to adjust further institutional development, so to warrant their function as contexts in which values-as-hypotheses can be tested. The grounds and conditions for moral learning ought to be mapped out in much more detail.

The need to have an approach that integrates refections about values, institutions, and deliberation is pressing, as COVID-19 is far from the only global crisis that invokes frm value-laden decisions we are facing. One only has to think about the radical societal, political, and moral changes needed to take on the challenge of global climate change (Pesch, 2018, 2020b). For example, it is easy to consider the COVID-19 pandemic to be a 'wasted' crisis. The arrival of COVID-19 could have been taken up as an opportunity to reconsider the lock-in of vested interests and incumbent practices; instead, policy decisions primarily served the continuation of the existing economic status quo, urging producers to produce more and consumers to consume more (cf. Dartnell & Kish, 2021; Heintz et al., 2021). Not only does this reveal the reproduction of incumbent institutional practices, but it also testifes the unwillingness of political leaders to address issues that give rise to societal contestation. This suggests that the value pluralism that should be key to public deliberation is seen as unwanted (also see Cuppen & Pesch, 2021; Pesch & Vermaas, 2020). Hopefully, an ethics that can pinpoint these shortcomings and give concrete recommendations would help conquer such developments. Though I have only explored my ideas tentatively in this chapter, I think that seeing messy institutions as contexts within which values can be tested and substantiated as hypotheses would serve such an ethics.

### **References**

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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### **Part II Envisioning a Post-Pandemic Future**

### **Chapter 8 Offsetting Present Risks, Preempting Future Harms, and the Ethics of a 'New Normal'**

**Sven Nyholm and Kritika Maheshwari**

### **8.1 Introduction**

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have witnessed several changes and shifts in our ordinary, everyday behaviour. In an effort to mitigate and tackle the risk of global spreading of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, governments, scientists, and various health organisations proposed adopting new safety precautions. For instance, working and schooling small children from home became the norm amongst those who had the option to do so. In addition, wearing a facemask to the supermarket or keeping a 1.5 m distance from one another when in public spaces suddenly became widespread in many parts of the world.

For most people, the idea of undertaking precautions like wearing a medical facemask unless one is in a hospital or of not being permitted to visit restaurants nor work in their workplace would have seemed incredible before. But suddenly, this was, and in some places continues to be, what many referred to as "the new normal". For instance, in implementing mandatory face masks as a national health policy, India's Union Government notifed its citizens, saying, "we should

S. Nyholm (\*)

Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
K. Maheshwari University of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
incorporate it in our lives as a new normal".1 Similarly, in announcing the return of mandatory masks in public as a long-lasting social practice, the Governor of Connecticut, Ned Lamont, informed his fellow Americans that, "We are going to be getting back to normal; it will be a new normal".2

While discussions of a new normal gained momentum during the COVID-19 pandemic, what exactly people mean when they speak and write about it is not always clear. Moreover, it is noteworthy that there are also various other cases that can be and that have sometimes been classifed as being a new normal: for example, this can happen when new technologies are introduced (e.g. a new normal emerges in a world in which self-driving cars populate public streets) or when other changes occur (e.g. a new normal emerges in a world with drastic climate change). While there is an extensive discussion of pandemic ethics, and also independent discussions of related cases in the literature, the idea of exploring a range of different cases under the umbrella of "a new normal" at a general level remains nascent and under-explored.

Our aim in this chapter is to engage in preliminary groundwork for what we will call the "ethics of a new normal" more generally. We are interested in what different kinds of situations that can be viewed as involving a new normal have in common from an ethical point of view, and we will identify a number of key considerations that are likely to be relevant in most instances of what could be called the ethics of a new normal. We think it is useful not only to think about those different kinds of cases in isolation, but also in relation to each other, with an eye to what they have in common. This can be useful for engaging with or discussing a new normal that is already a reality – like the COVID-19 pandemic – or a new normal that we are already transitioning towards. It can also be useful when we discuss a new normal that we are likely to transition to – like a future with driverless cars or a future dealing with the problems associated with climate change.

Our discussion proceeds as follows. In Sect. 8.2, we offer a schematic defnition of what we mean by "the ethics of a new normal" and explicate its relationship with familiar topics in the literature. Section 8.3 explores different examples of concrete ethical discussions that can be classifed as instances of the ethics of a new normal. Section 8.4 identifes some morally relevant distinctions important for discussing the ethics of a new normal. This section provides a classifcation of such distinctions, which is summarized in a table at the end of the section. In Sect. 8.5, we discuss shortcomings of popular hardliner arguments for transitioning towards the new normal offered in the literature. Finally, we propose an alternative: drawing upon John Broome's discussion of offsetting climate harms, we discuss a general riskoffsetting principle as a plausible alternative for thinking about how to respond to a new normal. Section 8.6 concludes.

1 https://www.livemint.com/news/india/face-masks-are-new-normal-incorporate-it-in-our-livescentre-amid-third-covid-wave-fears-11626432848811.html (Accessed on September 19, 2021) 2 https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/414437/covid-19-worldwide-cases-exceed-2-million-deathtoll-crosses-136-600 (Accessed on September 19, 2021)

### **8.2 Outlining the "Ethics of a New Normal"**

Addressing any ethical or political issues surrounding any so-called new normal must presuppose an account of what a new normal is or what it represents. For instance, in recent times of COVID-19, academic and public discussions mainly revolved around questions of whether and how our "new normal" ways of responding to pandemic risks should or could be our "new future" (e.g. Bramble, 2020). Little attention, however, is paid to the very idea of the "new normal" itself. What, for instance, makes a situation or a particular state of affairs a "new normal" in a morally and/or politically relevant sense? Or, to put it differently, when and why do certain change(s) in affairs indicate the advent or beginnings of an actual or potential new normal that deserves our attention?

While there is no defnitive understanding of the notion of "a new normal", it appears to be common to use this phrase when some new risk has been introduced and new safety precautions are therefore called for. Jeff Clyde Corpuz (2021) notes that the frst use of "a new normal" was likely during the time of the 2008 fnancial crisis. Back then, the term referred to the various impacts the crisis had on individuals and society at large, such as conditions of precariousness and long periods of social unrest. In current discussions of a new normal, many people seem to refer to the idea of a shift, change, or transition in an existing or established set of individual or structural risk-taking or risk-creating practice(s) or behaviour(s).

We will mostly be focusing on issues related to likely harms and other risks below, since that seems to be a common factor in many discussions of a new normal. But on the most general level, we will take it that "a new normal" refers to a situation or a state of affairs that is different relative to some temporal baseline. The difference in the state of affairs may track changes or shifts in our social, moral, legal, economic, epistemic, psychological, biological behaviour, practices, norms, or a combination of these. In each case it would be a "new normal" in light of one factor or set of factors that has either been introduced, removed, or modifed in a way that impacts how we live our day-to-day lives, conduct our current affairs, or what we consider as normal. By "the ethics of a new normal", we mean any and all ethical questions having specifcally to do with such factors that contribute to the existence of a new normal.

What we are calling the "ethics of the new normal" here is not often discussed in these general terms. But it is closely related to, and partly overlaps with, various other ongoing and well-established discussions within applied ethics and moral philosophy more generally. Here are some examples that we can briefy consider in order to situate what we are calling the ethics of a new normal in relation to other on-going debates. (In the next section, we will consider concrete examples of ongoing debates that we think are clear instances of the ethics of a new normal.)

First, there is the ethics of risk more generally (E.g., Hansson, 2003; Hayenhjelm & Wolff, 2012; Maheshwari, 2021). This is the discussion of how we should deal with risks and uncertainty in life, why it is bad to be exposed to risk, what is wrong with imposing risks on others, how much risk is acceptable in life, what safety precautions are ethically required in different parts of life, and so on. Such questions about the ethics of risk are highly relevant in any discussion of the ethics of a new normal. The reason for that is that a new normal can often be understood as a situation where one or more new risks or sources of uncertainty have been introduced into human life, which makes a difference to how we have reason to go about our everyday lives.

Second, there is the ethics of resilience (Cañizares et al., 2021). This is a set of ethical issues related to how resilience can or should be achieved in essential parts of human life. This is often discussed within engineering ethics. There is an important paradigm within engineering research, "resilience engineering", which is about how the outputs of engineering projects (bridges, socio-technological systems, and so on) can be made resilient against different kinds of pressures (Doorn, 2021). Resilience is also an important concept within discussions about health and how to protect the health of human beings and non-human animals, or perhaps even the health of whole ecosystems. The ethics of resilience is highly relevant to, but also partly different from, what we call the ethics of a new normal. Resilience is usually about maintaining something that already exists or maintaining something that is being created. In the ethics of a new normal, the main issue is dealing with new challenges that affect our day-to-day lives. Thus, matters related to resilience are central to the ethics of a new normal. But other questions are paramount as well: for example, whether to respond to new challenges to our everyday lives by creating new forms of safety precautions or design other forms of harm- or risk reduction strategies.

Third, one more thing – the last thing we will mention here – that comes to mind as partly overlapping with and certainly relevant for the ethics of a new normal is the debate about transitional justice (E.g. Teitel, 2000; Murphy, 2012). When academics and others discuss transitional justice, they usually talk about protecting human rights after some armed confict, natural disaster, or other events that might raise questions about justice after a transition from one state of affairs to another. Such discussions can be seen as being about a new normal. Accordingly, we view transitional justice debates as being included in the general category of the ethics of a new normal. But we understand the ethics of a new normal to cover a wider range of issues than those very important ones that specifcally have to do with human rights and justice that are part of transitional justice debates. We will now put forward a number of other examples of concrete topics and debates that we view as important instances of the ethics of a new normal.

### **8.3 Examples of Ethical Debates that Can Be Viewed as Part of the Ethics of a New Normal**

As noted above, our characterisation of a new normal is intended to be general and expansive to the effect that it allows us to situate various ongoing ethical debates about current, future, or potential new normal scenarios under the broader umbrella of "the ethics of a new normal". In this section we identify a number of discussions and specifc contributions to practical ethics that can be viewed as being part of the ethics of a new normal. As we see things, it is often useful to compare ethical discussions that are going on in parallel, that might have interesting similarities, and that can therefore be interesting to discuss side-by-side under a general heading. Hence we see it as useful to consider whether different ongoing discussions in practical ethics can be viewed as ftting under the heading of the ethics of a new normal. Additionally, we think that there are cases where the term "a new normal" might not have been used explicitly but where it nevertheless makes sense to compare those cases with other cases that have explicitly been labeled as a new normal.

This holds, for instance, in the case of discussions of disruptive technologies that are on the horizon but are not yet widespread in society. Take the introduction of self-driving cars or artifcially intelligent humanoid robots that may be on the horizon (Nyholm, 2020; Royakkers and van Est, 2015). These can also be seen as bringing about a new situation where there is a new key factor or set of factors that people need to consider when going about their day-to-day lives. When it comes to humanoid robots, philosophers have begun discussing whether a new normal involving such robots would require us to give certain rights to those robots or treat them with some degree of moral consideration. (Nyholm, 2020: Chap. 8) Consider next selfdriving cars. In recent years, there has been a lot of hype about the large-scale introduction of autonomous vehicles, also known as self-driving cars, into public traffc (Gurney, 2016). Both academic and public discussions are flled with speculation and anticipation of how things could or should be in light of changes in our routine driving practices if and when self-driving cars on our public roads becomes the new normal (e.g. Royakkers and van Est, 2015).

For instance, would we no longer need to avoid drinking alcohol before using a car? Would driving as a profession no longer exist? Or – to also bring up a muchdiscussed topic – how should these self-driving cars handle risky scenarios where accidents appear to be unavoidable? And who should be held responsible if and when a self-driving car injures or kills a human being? (Nyholm, 2018a; b). Being faced with such questions will soon, many think, not only be a hypothetical future scenario. It will instead be a new normal within the domain of traffc (Gogoll & Müller, 2020). The same can be said about many other technologies that are currently primarily part of visions of what the future will be like: e.g. our other justmentioned example of maximally humanlike robots with high degrees of artifcial intelligence (e.g. Danaher, 2020; Schwitzgebel & Garza, 2020). We are not yet living in a world featuring such technologies. But before we know it, it might be the new normal.

Likewise, the developments related to climate change and the factors differentiating the modern world from previous times in human history are examples of new factors providing reasons to refect on how we live our lives (Jamieson, 2014; Di Paola, 2017). Frequent very extreme weather conditions – such as hurricanes or tornados – and much higher average temperatures, and all of the impacts this will have on nature, are often discussed as things that future people will have to deal with as part of their everyday experience. It might soon become the new normal that temperatures are sweltering, that extreme weather changes become much more common, and that an increased number of places in the world will become uninhabitable for human beings and many non-human animals (Broome, 2012). This is another expected transition to a new normal that raises numerous pressing ethical questions about the ethical defensibility of our current ways of living and consumption patterns.

In two relatively recent books that are worth mentioning in this context – *Death and the Afterlife* (2011) and *Why Worry about Future Generations* (2018) – Samuel Scheffer's discussion of the relationship between current and future generations appears to fall under the ethics of a new normal. According to Scheffer, it matters to us more than we might realise whether or not there will be people around after we are gone. To illustrate this, one of the things Scheffer does is to ask his readers to imagine the prospects of Armageddon-like scenarios, wherein we realise that we are the last generation of people who will ever live (also c.f. Ord, 2020). The scenarios Scheffer discusses are inspired by science fction. But his aim in using such scenarios is to try to get us to realise what matters to us in real life when it comes to our relation to the people who will exist – or perhaps not exist, depending on how things go – in the future, after we ourselves are dead.

In one scenario Scheffer lays out, a giant asteroid is travelling through space towards the planet Earth. It is clear that the collision between this asteroid and our planet will cause so much damage that human life on Earth will no longer be possible after the collision. Thus, the people in Scheffer's example face the "new normal" of realising that they are the last people who will live and that human life will end soon.

In a second scenario – inspired by P.G. James's novel *The Children of Men* – there is no asteroid travelling towards Earth that is about to suddenly kill everyone in a violent collision. However, human life will end for another reason. Everyone has become infertile, and nobody has conceived a child for the last 25 years. This universal infertility is not the result of anything anybody did. Moreover, people are otherwise healthy, and it seems that they will get to live out their full lifespan. But nobody will come after them since nobody is having any children. This is another "new normal" that Scheffer asks us to consider and react to (though he does not use the expression "new normal").

Scheffer's aim in putting these examples forward and asking his readers to react to them is to try to make us see what value we put – either explicitly or at least implicitly – on there being people who will live after we are gone, and who can carry on our projects, and who can value the sorts of things we value. The normal situation is that we safely assume that there will be people coming after us. But with

climate change and other existential threats to humanity, the new normal might become or already be that we cannot anymore simply take for granted that future generations will take over after we are gone. (Scheffer, 2011, 2018, see also Ord, 2020 and Nyholm, 2021).

Another striking instance of the ethics of a new normal appears in the book *Unft for the Future,* wherein Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu (Persson & Savulescu, 2012) argue that we today face risks – including risks of what they call "ultimate harm", viz. potentially irreparable damage to the possibility of future human life on Earth – that our evolved human psychology has not been adapted to help us deal with. In comparing the circumstances in which human beings have lived during most of the history of our species with the circumstances of living in the modern world, Persson and Savulescu, in effect, argue that we seem to be part of a new normal whereby the modern world involves ethical challenges – related to existential risks and large-scale collective action problems – that our evolved human psychology is not ready for. Thus, we are, Persson and Savulescu argue, "unft for the future" to an extent that raises urgent ethical questions about how to deal with or respond to these "new" aspects of the new normal.

We are bringing up this example – not only to give yet another example of something that could be classifed as a case of the ethics of a new normal – but also to illustrate what counts as a new normal is a relative matter. Compared to the 150,000–200,000 years of the history of our species, life in the modern world is a unique situation for our human species. Most of human history so far took place in a very different kind of world, as described by Persson and Savulescu in their discussion. That is an extremely long-term perspective.

That situation described from this long-term perspective is one kind of new normal. It is a new normal in the grand scheme of things. But, by a new normal, we might also mean something much more abrupt than the transition from prehistoric times to the present. We might mean the transition between, say, everyday life as it was in 2019 before the COVID-19 pandemic and life as it came to be, in most of the world, thereafter, during, say, 2020 and 2021. For instance, the COVID-19 pandemic has recently introduced new factors that we have reason to consider when we decide how to live our everyday lives, namely, the presence of the Coronavirus and its dangers and risks (Bramble, 2020). The switch to wearing masks or keeping a 1.5 meter distance to reduce one's potential exposure to risk, for instance, marked an instantaneous change in our social behaviour and practice.

As we have just seen, there is a range of different discussions that can be seen as all being part of the overall topic of the ethics of a new normal. We are interested in what different cases of an ethics of a new normal have in common. And we are here looking at these kinds of cases from a zoomed-out perspective to see whether there are any general distinctions, considerations, or principles that are likely to be relevant in most or all of these cases. What we are calling the "ethics of the new normal" here is not often discussed in these general terms, as far as we know. But as we have just seen, various ongoing and well-established discussions within applied ethics and moral philosophy more generally are clear instances where what is being the discussed is the ethics of a new normal.

### **8.4 Some Key Distinctions**

To analyse any given situation that is a new normal or likely to become the new normal, further clarifcation regarding the scope, the depth, and the breadth of the ethical questions that may arise within its domain is required. The exact details of different situations that can be labeled a new normal will differ, but it is also possible to refect on ethically relevant features that many, if not most, situations that can be labeled a new normal might have in common. To this end, we will now note some basic, general distinctions that are likely to be relevant in most or all of these cases.3

First, we distinguish whether everyone currently existing or who will exist, or only some subset of this population is affected by a new normal. This distinction has two applications: frst, we can ask who has reason to change their ways of going about their everyday lives because of the new normal. And second, we can ask whose lives are directly impacted by any good or harmful effects of the new normal. Sometimes, the answers to those questions can refer to one and the same group. But there might only be a partial overlap. Or perhaps they are two separate groups.

Consider climate change as an example. Those who live now and might be concerned about how their lifestyles might adversely impact the climate may feel that they have reason to change their day-to-day behaviour to lessen the harmful effects climate change might have on the lives of people who will live after we are all dead. Or we might have a case where the people affected by the new normal also have reason to change their normal habits. This happened for most people in the world during the COVID-19 pandemic. Everyone faced the risk of getting the virus, and everyone, or almost everyone, had reason to change their day-to-day habits.

With climate change, by contrast, it might frst be the case that only some are primarily affected. For example, for the people living in the Maldives, climate change will soon have an extreme impact since the island nation will most likely end up completely underwater within 75 years or so.4 Later on, when climate change becomes more extreme, it might dramatically affect all people worldwide.

Relatedly, we can draw a distinction between whether life, in general, is affected by the new normal or whether there is primarily one part of life that might be affected by a new normal. So, for example, with something like climate change or a pandemic, it may be that life in general – or almost every aspect of life – is impacted by the new normal. But when it comes to introducing some new technology, it may be that it is primarily one specifc part of life that is affected.

Of course, there might be ripple or cascading effects and repercussions on other aspects of life, but the central part of life where there is a new normal might be some clearly defnable part of life. If fully self-driving cars are introduced as an option, we can use them on the road, for example, and the part of life that might be regarded as a new normal is primarily the domain of traffc. This might be a case where there

3Note that this list of distinctions is not exhaustive.

4 https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2010/04/06/climate-change-in-the-maldives (Accessed on September 19, 2021)

are various further effects and repercussions – if we are to believe some of the speculations about what will happen when fully self-driving cars become widespread! – but it is most obviously traffc where there is a new normal (Royakkers and van Est, 2015).

Another distinction that is relevant to draw is between whether the new normal is likely to be a transitory phase or whether the new normal is something more permanent. For example, a pandemic might mean a new normal where life is turned upside-down for a while – perhaps even a long time. But in the end, things might "go back to normal" in the sense that they will resemble how things were before the pandemic again. In contrast, when climate change becomes extreme, it might be that there is no turning back; the new normal might be here to stay. This overlaps with the distinction between whether some new normal is reversible or whether it is irreversible.

For instance, in case of an ongoing pandemic, unless a vaccine is invented with an extremely high effcacy or other ways of dealing with a pandemic are worked out, life in a world with a novel virus might irreversibly be a new normal, where we cannot go back to how things were before. But with the right technologies and other ways of tackling the multiple problems of this pandemic, it might be that the new normal is reversible and that there is a way of going back to how things were before. With something like climate change caused by large-scale pollution and resource depletion, in contrast, the problem might be irreversible, and the new normal might be there to stay. It should be noted, though, that what is apparently irreversible might not be de facto irreversible. Even something like climate change might, according to some technology optimists, be a reversible problem.5

This points to a closely related distinction of whether a new normal results from human agency or some natural cause outside of human control. In other words, is it anybody's fault – our own fault perhaps – that something has become the new normal or might soon become the new normal? Was it because of something that some individual or group of individuals – or some big collective of people – did? Or did the new normal come about because of some other reason? For example, during the COVID-19 pandemic, there was widespread speculation over whether the virus was naturally occurring or was created in a laboratory by human beings. Similarly, whether climate change depends on our human lifestyles or primarily on other causes is something that animates those concerned about climate change.

In general, whether a new normal is the result of human agency or not matters greatly to what ethical categories of assessment are appropriate to use in the evaluation of options and when we think about how it is appropriate to respond to the new normal. So, for example, should we think in terms of whether people living now have duties of goodness or duties of justice towards future generations, to use two expressions from John Broome's (2012) book *Climate Matters: Ethics in a Warming World*? Or should we instead think in Shefferian terms of whether we have reasons

5See, for instance, the discussion about geo-engineering in Scott (2012).

**Table 8.1** Key distinctions and concepts within the ethics of a new normal

to feel some form of despair, resignation, or existential sense of meaninglessness when we think of worrying aspects of a new normal? (Nyholm, 2021).

There are four broad classes of cases that seem to call for different forms of normative assessment. In one kind of case, the new normal is nobody's fault, and it might be unclear whether there is anything we can do about it. By contrast, secondly, there can also be cases in which the new normal is nobody's fault, but where there is something that can be done. Thirdly, there are cases in which the new normal is somebody's fault and where something can be done about it. Fourth and lastly, there is, of course, also the grimmer type of case where the new normal is somebody's fault – either some individual or some group's fault – but where there is nothing that anybody can do to deal with whatever problems or risks are involved in the new normal. These four kinds of scenarios differ with respect to what normative duties or appropriate responses we should associate them with.

We can summarize some of the above-considered distinctions in a matrix as follows (Table 8.1):

### **8.5 The Hardliner Vs the Offsetting Approach to the Ethics of a New Normal**

As noted above, in his earlier-mentioned book, Broome (2012) distinguishes between duties of goodness (or duties of benevolence), on the one hand, and duties of justice, on the other hand. If, for example, there is something we can do to deal with some problem associated with a new normal, but it is nobody's fault that there

is this new normal (e.g. there is a naturally occurring virus), it might be that our duties to act are not associated with rectifying some injustice but that our ethical duties are instead related to what it would be good or benevolent to do. By contrast, if some problem (e.g. the issues related to human-created climate change) is our fault, we might have what Broome calls duties of justice to change the way we live our lives to try to counteract the problem. Lastly, suppose a problem associated with a new normal is our fault, but that nothing can be done about it. (According to some people's estimates, this might soon be the case in relation to human-created climate change. (Persson & Savulescu, 2012)) In that case, the normatively appropriate response might be deep regret or a realisation that what we have done is the opposite of something positively meaningful (Nyholm, 2021).

In most cases, the new factor or set of factors that creates a new normal is some risk or set of risks. Or it might be some new technology that can be used to deal with risks in a novel way. In each type of case, risks and safety considerations are central to what helps to defne something as a new normal. For example, the new normal related to the COVID-19 pandemic had to do with the new risks introduced by the Coronavirus. Similarly, the new normal pertaining to climate change has to do with new risks of great harm related to living in a different type of climate. And, to give one more example, new technologies (such as fully self-driving cars) might be claimed to have as their primary beneft to make some activity (in this case, driving) safer (Gurney, 2016). So, the duties of goodness and duties of justice related to a new normal are typically going to be duties of goodness or justice of how to respond to risks. The last thing we will do is, therefore, to briefy discuss the ethics of how to deal with risks and risk management concerning a new normal.

Notably, when a new normal comes about or is about to come about, and this involves introducing new risks or new ways of mitigating risks, this will often lead some to suggest what we will call a hardline approach. For example, in a recent article about the COVID-19 pandemic, Peter Singer (2021) argues that there is an obligation that applies to everyone that we should all get vaccinated. This should not, as some think, be a matter of personal choice.6 In discussing this issue, Singer makes a comparison between compulsory COVID-19 vaccinations and compulsory seat-belt use. We should have the former, just like we should have the latter, and for similar reasons, Singer argues. Call this a hardliner approach.

This way of arguing – i.e., approaching the ethics of risks by comparing one type of safety precaution with another – is common in the specifc discussions we have identifed above as being instances of the ethics of a new normal (cf. Giubilini & Savulescu, 2019). It is common in the ethics of dealing with the COVID-19

6A member of the United States archery team that competed in the Tokyo 2020 Olympics – Brady Ellison – took that view, decided not to get vaccinated, and claimed that such a decision is "one hundred percent a personal choice," and that "anyone that says otherwise is taking away people's freedoms." In arguing for compulsory vaccinations, Singer was reacting to such views – even directly quoting the athlete Ellison disapprovingly – and he argues that a view like Ellison's falsely makes it appear as if the only person affected by their choice not to get vaccinated is the person him or herself.

pandemic, impending climate change, and the introduction of new technologies, such as fully self-driving cars.

For example, Jan Gogoll and Julian Müller (Gogoll & Müller, 2020) discuss the choice between fully self-driving cars and regular cars in a new normal in which we would face such a choice. They argue that if self-driving cars would be safer than standard cars, then everyone should be made to use self-driving vehicles rather than regular cars. To make this case, they appeal to an argument that Jason Brennan (2018) has put forward in the context of vaccination ethics for why, according to him, even libertarians can be in favour of compulsory vaccinations. The general idea, borrowed from Sven Ove Hansson, is that imposing risks on others is only permissible if it is part of a practice that works to everyone's beneft and there is no alternative practice that works better to everyone's beneft (Hansson, 2003).

In this hardliner picture, something like the practice of mask-wearing, for instance, as a way to reduce one's chances of imposing risks on others involves mandatory transitioning from an "old normal", where wearing masks was not part of a risk-mitigating or risk-reducing socially benefcial activity, to a "new normal", where this is the case. The introduction of autonomous self-driving cars deemed safer than ordinary cars may involve a similar type of transition. It might involve transitioning from the "old normal", where driving ordinary cars is considered a socially benefcial activity that involves mutually advantageous risk-taking for members of a society, to a "new normal", where this is the case only for autonomous self-driving cars.

These new ways may entirely override, replace, or supplant existing safety norms and practices of taking precautionary and preventative actions (or omissions). If we consider such transitions only with an eye to the aim of promoting safety, and we set other considerations aside, moving to the safer alternative will often seem like the right thing to do. However, this idea of mandatorily transitioning into a new normal by changing one's behaviour in response to new risks is not without controversies, for it overlooks certain feasibility considerations. For instance, in many places, people either simply failed to afford taking precautionary measures like wearing expensive masks because of lack of fnancial resources or failed to observe recommended actions like maintaining distance in public spaces was simply not physically feasible due to shortage of space.

What would be another approach? One type of approach we have in effect already considered: namely, the idea that it should be a personal choice whether one wants to take some form of safety precaution in response to the risks associated with some new type of situation. This was the approach that the Olympic archer Brady Ellison advocated concerning COVID-19 vaccines, as mentioned in footnote 6 (Singer, 2021). It is also an approach that some have voiced their approval of when it comes to choosing between fully self-driving cars and manually driven cars.

Something called the "human driving association" has published a "human driving manifesto", in which they argue that people's freedom to drive regular cars should not be taken away if fully self-driving cars are introduced into society (Roy, 2018). This organisation is, they say, "pro steering wheel"; they do not want to be forced to drive self-driving cars, even if they would turn out to be safer than regular cars. Interestingly, however, the rest of the "human driving manifesto" signals a willingness to advocate extra safety precautions for those who wish to continue driving regular cars even as the option of what would supposedly be safer selfdriving cars is introduced. Thus, for example, the members of the human driving association signal a willingness to make the tests one has to pass to get a driver's license much more demanding so that only those who drive in a very safe way can get a license.

They also show openness to other forms of technological safety precautions, such as lane-keeping assistance technologies. And one can also imagine things such as alcohol locks and speed regulation technologies that could help make manual driving safer than it might be at present. These would be ways of compensating for the additional risks associated with regular cars to make the safety level of manual driving more like that of self-driving cars (Nyholm & Smids, 2020).

This is reminiscent of an approach that Broome (2012) suggests regarding alternative ways of dealing with our carbon footprint and climate change. Broome does not argue against the hardliner approach of doing things that would lessen one's carbon footprint, e.g., no longer travelling in aeroplanes, driving less, or whatever. But he does argue that there is an equally defensible alternative. Broome argues that we can compensate for or "offset" our carbon footprint and that this can be equally acceptable to minimising our carbon footprint.

How could one offset one's carbon footprint? Broome discusses options such as planting trees, paying some form of climate tax that could be used to compensate people of the future, or – and this is an exciting idea! – buying environmentally friendly stoves for people in communities where they cook with environmentally unfriendly stoves. If we do these kinds of things that help to neutralise our impact – if we put back as much as we take away – this is equally good as trying to lessen or minimise our carbon footprint, Broome argues.

A more general principle along these lines could be something like the following: when a new normal comes about, and there is some new option that helps to counteract the risks associated with the new normal, we should either go for this option or, alternatively, make use of other safety precautions that could help to offset the risks we create by not making use of that seemingly safest option. Call this the risk-offsetting principle (Cf. Nyholm, in press).

Suppose somebody does not wish to be vaccinated against COVID-19, or that they do not want to wear a facemask even though that is deemed to be an effcient safety precaution. In theory, they could potentially get away with this from an ethical point of view if they took some other form of safety precaution. For example, they could get away with it if they consistently maintained a safe distance (over one and a half meters) between themselves and other people. Of course, in practice, this will be hard to do for most people, but in theory it could be a way of offsetting the risks for others that are created by not getting vaccinated or not wearing a facemask.

Or suppose self-driving cars indeed become safer than regular cars, but somebody wants to continue driving a manually driven car. In that case, they could potentially get away with this from an ethical point of view if they took added safety precautions (alcohol locks, speed limiting technologies, lane-keeping assistance technologies, or whatever) that would help to offset the risks associated with driving a regular car rather than using a self-driving car. These kinds of choices – either to use the newer, safer option or to use additional safety precautions when going for some other, less safe option – are likely to arise in many situations involving a new normal when some new risk or some new form of safety precaution is introduced into some part of life. Accordingly, we think that a general principle such as the one just sketched is likely to be relevant in most cases we are dealing with the ethics of a new normal.

### **8.6 Concluding Remarks**

As noted above, when the COVID-19 pandemic was at its height, and people were forced to take various forms of safety precautions in their day-to-day lives that previously could not have been imagined (wearing facemasks, working from home, not going to bars and restaurants, and so on), some started speaking about a "new normal". As we have noted above, ethical discussions about how we might need to change our behaviour in response to a new situation are not limited to the case of a pandemic. Other forms of development can also create a new normal, either concerning life in general or only in some specifc domain. And similar ethical questions about how we should change our everyday behaviour arise then as well. For example, climate change is increasingly putting pressure on whether our day-to-day ways of living in the modern world are acceptable. Or if a new technology (e.g., fully self-driving cars) is introduced into society and functions as a game-changer in terms of risks and safety precautions, this is also part of the ethics of a new normal.

In this chapter, we have zoomed out to a general level and considered the very idea of a new normal and refected on what broad ethical distinctions, considerations, and principles might be worth considering in most cases where we are facing an ethics of a new normal. Our discussion above is by no means a complete account of how we should approach the ethics of a new normal. It is a sketch of some of the considerations, distinctions, and principles that seem like they will be relevant in most discussions of this sort. More work is needed. We hope that our remarks above might stimulate others to zoom out to the more general level and ask what different cases of a new normal might have in common from an ethical point of view.7

7We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer and to the editors of this volume. Sven Nyholm's work on this article is part of the research program Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies, which is funded through the Gravitation program of the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science and the Netherlands Organization for Scientifc Research (NWO grant number 024.004.031).

161 8 Offsetting Present Risks, Preempting Future Harms, and the Ethics of a 'New Normal'

### **References**

Bramble, B. (2020). *Pandemic ethics*. Bartleby Books.

Teitel, R. G. (2000). *Transitional justice*. Oxford University Press.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

### **Chapter 9 Designing in Times of Uncertainty: What Virtue Ethics Can Bring to Engineering Ethics in the Twenty-First Century**

**Jan Peter Bergen and Zoë Robaey**

### **9.1 Introduction**

Among the many lessons that the COVID-19 pandemic has forced upon us is the stark reminder that we cannot assume that the world of tomorrow will be like today. Serious changes to our communal lives can happen quickly and with little warning. When that happens, we need to change with it. But, of course, COVID-19 is not alone in driving such developments. Climate change, geopolitical developments, or disruptive technological innovations present serious moral, political, economic, scientifc and/or technical challenges. While none of these can be solved by only technological means, technological innovation will undoubtedly be part of confronting such issues.

Unsurprisingly, this translates into responsibilities for those developing these technologies, especially as calls for morally responsible innovation become increasingly pressing (Brundage & Guston, 2019). However, this puts innovators – including engineers – in a diffcult position since making design choices implies having suffcient information to make those choices and the accompanying trade-offs. However, in times of rapid and sometimes unpredictable socio-technical change, the necessary knowledge may be lacking, either because the facts of the matter and/ or the normative aspects that should guide decision-making are unclear (van de Poel & Robaey, 2017). In such cases of uncertainty, deliberation about what constitutes good engineering design becomes diffcult. Furthermore, given the fact that an innovation's consequences (e.g., in cost-beneft analysis and risk assessment) and

J. P. Bergen

© The Author(s) 2022

University of Twente, Enschede, Netherlands e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
Z. Robaey (\*) Wageningen University, Wageningen, Netherlands e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
M. J. Dennis et al. (eds.), *Values for a Post-Pandemic Future*, Philosophy of Engineering and Technology 40, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08424-9\_9

norm-based prescriptions (e.g., in engineering codes of conduct) often guide engineering decision-making, it should not surprise us that decision-making becomes more complicated when one or both types of inputs for good engineering decisions are insuffcient.

To overcome the defciencies of consequentialist and deontological approaches to engineering ethics, some have proposed that virtue ethics could help (e.g., Schmidt, 2014) and may be particularly helpful when facing uncertainty (Frigo et al., 2021). This chapter explores these suggestions, strengthening the case for virtue ethics in engineering ethics by showing how it can help deal with different types of uncertainty. We frst summarise the case for virtues in engineering ethics (Sect. 9.2), present different types of uncertainty, and compile a list of virtues relevant for engineering (Sect. 9.3). Finally, we present four uncertainty scenarios to analyse the impact of different virtues on engineering decisions (Sect. 9.4).

### **9.2 The Case for Virtues in Engineering Ethics**

The ancient tradition of virtue ethics experienced a revival in the twentieth century, which eventually saw it positioned next to consequentialism and deontology as one of the three major streams of modern ethical thought (Baril & Hazlett, 2019). It comes as no surprise, then, that virtue ethics has since been proposed as an alternative to consequentialist and deontological approaches for various human activities, not least of which engineering. In this section, we summarise the case made for virtue ethics in engineering, focussing on its alleged advantages vis-à-vis its theoretical rivals.

Generally, virtue ethics helps identify engineering as a normative and purposive practice, in turn facilitating an ethical understanding of its activities. Bowen (2009, 2014) proposes we understand engineering as a practice in the sense presented by MacIntyre, i.e., as a "coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realised in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially derivative of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved are systematically extended" (1981, p. 187). Viewing engineering through this lens, Bowen presents an explicitly virtue-ethical account of engineering. Following his analysis of its internal goods (e.g., technical excellence, cost-effectiveness, safety and especially, the satisfaction of contributing to the fourishing of others) and its external goods (e.g., prestige, wages, economic benefts for others, but most importantly, technological artefacts), he proposes the following end or goal of engineering: "the promotion of the fourishing of persons in communities through contribution to material well-being" (p. 20). To achieve this normative end by attaining engineering's internal goods, engineers need to act ethically. However, the question remains: how is virtue ethics better equipped to help engineers act ethically than its consequentialist and deontological counterparts?

The frst such advantage of virtue ethics is increased motivation to practise engineering responsibly. The dominant consequentialist and deontological foundations of engineering ethics aim primarily to prevent misconduct, risks, and disasters. This results in a 'preventive ethics' of engineering (Harris, 2008). However, while preventive ethics may be partially effective in achieving its goals, it lacks "an internal, motivational, and often idealistic element present in professional life that cannot adequately be accounted for by rules" (p. 155). It is this element that is said to be better accounted for and mobilised by virtue ethics, resulting in an 'aspirational' ethics that has a positive rather than a preventive orientation (Bowen, 2009; Harris, 2008; Schmidt, 2014; Steen et al., 2021). This positive orientation also captures some of the zeitgeist we experienced at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. In her essay 'The Pandemic is a Portal' writer Arundhaty Roy (2020) invited readers to think about what kind of world we should aspire to after this historically transformative experience, an invitation that virtue ethics would extend to engineers as well.

On the one hand, this is because virtue ethics may be comparatively better suited to keep engineers pointed towards the normative goal of engineering. This is in part due to the 'modern' origins of consequentialist and deontological ethics since, like engineering, they function according to the paradigm of 'technical rationality' (Schmidt, 2014), which assumes that the knowledge and skill necessary for a practice can be captured in specifc and generalisable rules, prescriptions or instructions. This abstraction of ethics from the actual practice and from the persons involved risks aggravating the disconnect between engineers and the goal of their practice (i.e., the fourishing of people), with them considering values like effciency and technical ingenuity as ends in themselves instead (Bowen, 2009; Schmidt, 2014). Due to virtue ethics' focus on the person's virtues and the connection of professional virtue to the goal of engineering as a practice, it helps minimise this disconnect. On the other hand, virtue could be intrinsically rewarding to virtuous engineers. Indeed, virtue ethics promises to both "identif[y] good behavior and provid[e] the psychological motivation for conforming to that behavior. It may be a more effective prod to achieve good in the world than are less personal calls to maximize utility or conforming to rights and duties, precisely because it is so personal" (Crawford-Brown, 1997 p. 483). This has to do with the nature of virtues as moral dispositions achieved through education and experience. As Aristotle already noted in the Nicomachean Ethics (NE, II.3), both virtue and vice are concerned with pleasure and pain. However, it takes proper education to learn to enjoy the things one ought, to feel delight and pain rightly. It is a sign that a person has achieved virtue that they derive pleasure from exercising it and are characteristically disposed to doing so. This is no less true for professionals than it is for others, even if the virtues demanded by the profession may be specifc to it. Indeed, "adhering to professional virtues brings professional satisfaction, just as adhering to personal virtues brings satisfaction to one's personal life" (Harris, 2008 p. 158). The good engineer receives satisfaction from the virtuous exercise of their profession.

The second critical advantage of virtue ethics is that it helps engineers to perform their profession responsibly in a way not covered by its more act-oriented alternatives: "fulflling an engineer's responsibilities to protect public safety, health, and welfare calls as much for settled dispositions, or virtues, as it does for performing this or that specifc action." (Pritchard, 2001 p. 391). This is because those stable dispositions, both personal and professional, are an integral part of professional competence. This makes sense when understanding engineering as a normative practice since virtues are integral to practices that allow practitioners to achieve the practice's internal goods and end (Harris, 2008). One way virtues help the engineer practise their profession responsibly involves a peculiar aspect of virtue as a stable and deeply entrenched trait of character. Following Hursthouse, Harris sees virtue as 'multitrack', involving not simply reason, but "emotions and emotional reactions, choices, values, desires, perceptions, attitudes, interests, expectations and sensibilities." (Hursthouse, 2006 as cited in Harris, 2008 p.156). To cultivate engineering virtues is thus also to attune one's perception, values and sensibilities to those salient aspects of the context of engineering that allow the attainment of engineering's internal goods and goal. As a result, virtuous engineers are more likely to care about and be more sensitive to important aspects of situations and thus more prone to discover them. For example, the rapid development of contact-tracing apps during the COVID-19 pandemic raised diffcult trade-offs between privacy, security, public health and a host of other values that led to varied designs. In the Dutch context, for example, a strong emphasis was given to privacy (Verbeek et al., 2020) after consultation with experts. An engineer that is appropriately sensitive to and appreciative of the moral gravity of these trade-offs is also more likely to engineer ethically acceptable applications in these trying times.

Related to these sensibilities comes the idea that virtues, as stable traits of good character, allow the engineer to exercise their powers of discretion and judgement (Harris, 2008), improving decision-making (Sand, 2018), e.g., in selecting the appropriate heuristics in engineering decisions (Schmidt, 2014). Thus, not only does virtue ethics leave more room for the engineer to judge, but being virtuous makes them more capable of doing so. Of course, such virtue has to be cultivated through ample education and experience. However, this focus on education should not be taken as a downside of virtue ethics but rather a call for more dispositionoriented engineering ethics education.

At this point, it is imperative to note that the exercise of virtue both in the engineer's personal and professional life requires it to be done deliberately, with practical wisdom. Multiple authors have emphasised the importance of practical wisdom or *phronesis* for the virtuous engineer and the capability for proper engineering judgement (e.g., Frigo et al., 2021; Harris, 2008; Schmidt 2014; Steen et al., 2021). Aristotle defned practical judgement as "a reasoned and true state of capacity- to act concerning human goods" (NE VI.5). For engineers, this complex virtue would allow them to know what aspects of a situation are relevant, what virtues are appropriate in a given situation, how they ft together, and how they should be exemplifed in practice (Athanassoulis & Ross, 2010; Steen et al., 2021). As such, the virtue of practical wisdom may be of particular use when the consequences of an action are not entirely known, or the appropriate norms are not given, i.e., it may help engineers when signifcant aspects of the case are *uncertain* (Frigo et al., 2021).

In light of the above, the case for virtue ethics in engineering -possibly supplementary to consequentialist and deontological approaches- is extensive and *prima facie* convincing. As such, our goal is not to make this case anew. Rather, we aim to *strengthen* the case for virtue in engineering ethics by further highlighting its compatibility with current changes in engineering – specifcally the increased appreciation of uncertainty in engineering work, which might be exactly the type of attitude needed for engineering during and after the pandemic.

### **9.3 Virtue, Uncertainty and Engineering**