Penn Bioethics Seminar (PBS): Justice in Times of Crisis: Emergency Ethics and Social Justice

Justice in Times of Crisis: Emergency Ethics and Social Justice

Kok-Chor Tan, PhD
Professor of Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania

Lunch is provided for in-person attendees.
Livestreaming available via Zoom.

Do social justice and facts about background injustice matter in times of crisis? A crisis is an extreme non-ideal situation in which the stakes are high, in which a decision has to be urgently made, in which the relevant goods are absolutely scarce, and therefore a situation in which trade-offs have to be made among high-stake values. Thus, a crisis falls outside the normal “circumstances of justice”.  Accordingly, one might be tempted to conclude that ethical reasoning in a crisis – or “emergency ethics” – should be insulated from the demands of social justice. Emergency actors have a more immediate and specific goal. Their ethical decisions should focus on the urgent matter at hand, such as saving lives, averting ecological catastrophe, and the like, and these decisions should not be distracted by the longer-term aspirations of social justice.  I will oppose this independence of emergency ethics from social justice. I agree with the basic premise that emergency ethics is different from social justice because of their different circumstances and objectives, and that emergency ethical principles are not reducible to principles of justice. However, this does not mean that emergency ethics should be ‘insulated’ from the demands of justice. There are more and less fair ways of responding to a crisis, and justice sets constraints on how to ethically respond in an emergency.