A lot of the recent discussion about COVID-19 is about safety. Is it safe for people to visit their family members for holidays and special occasions? Is it safe to reopen schools? Is the vaccine safe?
To answer these questions, public officials generally look to experts. These experts include economists, public health officials at academic centers and agencies like the FDA, and health workers. Officials also use their own judgment to determine whether certain activities, such as in-person public school, religious gatherings or outdoor events, are safe.
But what does it mean for something to be safe? To say that an activity or a drug is safe is to say that the risks associated with it are worth it in light of the potential benefits. Safety isn’t the kind of thing that we can identify on a spreadsheet or through statistical analysis. Safety is a normative judgment.
Because safety is a normative judgment, when officials enforce policies that restrict people’s access to schooling, family members, church services, a vaccine, they are making a judgment about acceptable risk. Some people may disagree with officials’ judgments about whether a risk is acceptable, either because they are more risk acceptant or because they judge that the overall risks of refraining from an activity exceed the risks of doing it. Also, people may be conscientious about minimizing the risks of COVID-19 transmission but they decide to use their ‘risk budget’ in idiosyncratic ways, making their behavior seem unsafe when they are actually acting conscientiously on balance.
In these cases, enforcing a prohibitive policy that aims to keep people safe consists in imposing officials’ values and risk preferences on a group of people who may have very different values. So saying things like “I believe in science” or “I trust the experts” doesn’t really address people’s concerns about lockdowns, mandates, or restricted access to new vaccines, because scientific experts and regulators aren’t typically experts about how each person make tradeoffs between different values. Usually, each citizen is a better judge of whether something is worth it than a random public health bureaucrat or an elected official would be.
I’m not suggesting that public officials cannot justify restrictive policies for the sake of public safety. In some ways, these decisions are similar to policies that prohibit people from driving while intoxicated or policies that regulate factories and cars in order to reduce the health and environmental risks of air pollution. In these cases too, officials judge that it’s not worth it to allow people to drink and drive or pollute the air because the benefits of protecting people’s health by restricting these activities outweigh the burdens of enforcing a prohibitive law.
What I am suggesting is that for any policy that is justified on the grounds that it will keep people safe, the justification for that policy should appeal to the values at stake. And probative policies face an especially high justificatory burden because they involve imposing officials’ judgments about whether a risk is acceptable or worth it on a diverse group of people who may all have different tolerances for risk.