Pandemic Ethics

Pandemic ethics considers the challenges raised by acute infectious disease outbreaks on the social, economic, and health of individuals and communities. How do we balance competing interests of health, security, and human freedoms? Purely utilitarian calculations of net benefit are fraught with difficult assessments of happiness. Whose happiness? Whose justice and which rationality? How do we involve different voices in public discourse to develop an overlapping consensus that acknowledges fundamental inviolable moral norms?