Article The elderly owe the young compensation for the COVID lockdowns

[C C]

Philosopher tells us why the elderly owe the young compensation for the COVID lockdowns
https://bigthink.com/thinking/covid-lock...pensation/

INTRO: There has never been such a widespread and stringent lockdown as the one for COVID. [...] Before the vaccination rollout, COVID was estimated to kill roughly 1.4% of those infected, with the immunocompromised and elderly at far greater risk. This means that the vast majority of people in the world went into lockdown to help protect a minority of their societies.

Lockdown harmed a lot of people in a lot of ways. Everyone felt the brunt of its isolation. But not everyone was harmed to the same degree. Hundreds of millions of students fell behind in school — and many remain behind. In a recent paper published in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics, the philosopher Kal Kalewold argues that the lockdown disproportionately impacted younger age groups.

This led Kalewold to ask a controversial question: Given the young were least at risk from COVID but likeliest to suffer from the effects of the lockdown, do the elderly owe the young compensation? Kalewold elaborated on his position to Big Think.

Kalewold presents an argument that the elderly do owe the young some form of compensation. His logic is as follows:

States were morally justified in imposing lockdowns...

[....] Lockdown policies shifted the burden of harm and loss due to COVID from the elderly to the young...

[...] If harm is shifted from A to B, then A has a duty to compensate B...

[...] Therefore, the elderly have a duty to compensate the young... (MORE - missing details)
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Cynic's Corner: It should be from the hypocrite politicians and their confederate entertainers and business mogul donors (progressives are capitalists who merely hijack and exploit Left causes and values) who attended public and celebratory events, often without wearings masks themselves, while instituting lockdowns and demanding the hoi polloi remain isolated. Of course, the problem there is that they'd offer compensation via the usual parasitism on taxpayers, as with their other opportunistic, do-gooder agenda facades.

[Syne]

Yeah, just because you benefited and another was harmed doesn't mean you owe them, unless you had a hand in doing the harm yourself...like those business/special interests, like teachers unions and perhaps Amazon, that lobbied for lockdowns and/or profited from them.

[Yazata]

Kalewold presents an argument that the elderly do owe the young some form of compensation. His logic is as follows:

States were morally justified in imposing lockdowns...

They were? It seems to me to be more ethically responsible when designing policy to weigh costs against benefits.

With covid, it was epidemiologists and science-bureaucrats like Fauci who were calling all the shots (literally in this case). And all they seemed to care about was reducing disease transmission to zero, whatever the collateral damage their policies caused.

(The reductio-ad-absurdem of reducing disease transmission to zero whatever the cost, is the fact that killing the entire population would definitely halt disease transmission in that population. But most of us would think that cost was too high. So consideration of costs is obviously relevant.)

And in the months leading up to the 2020 election, any politician, scientist (or average social media participant) who criticized draconian anti-covid measures was accused of everything from being a purveyor of "disinformation", of being "anti-science", of being a mass-murderer, up to the worst, being a Trump supporter (horrors!),

A whole government censorship industry was set up on the fly.

Lockdown policies shifted the burden of harm and loss due to COVID from the elderly to the young...

That's debatable if the bulk of covid deaths were among the elderly.

If harm is shifted from A to B, then A has a duty to compensate B...

That's certainly a novel ethical principle. (I'd guess that Kalewold adopted it from critical race theory or someplace like that. It's how they try to justify reparations.)

A more defensible ethical principle is that if somebody harms somebody else, then the one causing the harm is at fault. That's the basis of tort law, after all.

Even then ethical problems arise. What if the harm was an unintended consequence of trying to do good?

Therefore, the elderly have a duty to compensate the young...

One may or may not be able to make a plausible argument that the politicians who enacted the covid lockdowns and extended school closures (often dictator-style simply by emergency decree) might bear some responsibility for the forseeable harmful results of those actions. The establishment media might share some responsibility as well for silencing any talk of the harm that was being done as "disinformation".

But trying to shift guilt and what amounts to a tort-liability duty of compensation to a whole class of people who had no hand in enacting the policies that were responsible for the harms, just seems ethically indefensible to me.

[Syne]

100% agree, except lockdowns were meant to lessen the deaths of the most vulnerable, i.e. the elderly, etc.. So if that goal was achieved at all, it is fair to say that some degree of harm was shifted from that vulnerable group to the young, much less vulnerable group. After all, the vulnerable could have isolated themselves without any effect at all on the less vulnerable.

That still doesn't justify holding the elderly responsible for policies they didn't create or enforce.

[Zinjanthropos]

Couldn’t help but think of the witch weighing scene from a Monty Python movie. This isn’t philosophy in my books, just someone looking for attention. Too bad there are those who will believe it.

What Kalewold is presenting is a simple witch hunt. He belongs in another century. At least he’s not advocating hanging or burning at the stake. I wonder how much of a stretch it is that because women generally live longer than men, means it’s really the elderly females to blame?

Not unusual for a segment of society to have blame for disease and more thrust upon them.

https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sci...nd-disease

[Syne]

Good analogy.