[Blog] What can contraceptive justice teach us about coronavirus?

A disease sweeps through the population, and is transmitted between people through ordinary social interaction. One group of people are particularly vulnerable, and infection has very serious consequences for them. Another group is able to transmit the disease, but has little risk of being harmed by it. Measures can be taken by individuals to stem the spread of the disease, but they are burdensome, and most people would rather not undertake them. Which group should be required to take measures to minimise harm? My moral intuition is that the group that has little or no risk of being harmed—the “transmitters”—should be solely or chiefly responsible for undertaking measures to protect those most at risk—the potential “sufferers.” While one might argue that this puts an unfair burden on the transmitters, the potential cost to the sufferers is so high that it is justifiable to impose such a burden. Further, potential sufferers should not have to shoulder both the risk of infection and the burden of protecting against it. That is the gist of my most recent research article. You’d be forgiven for assuming it’s about coronavirus. It isn’t. (I’m not so quick at thinking or writing as to have got around to that yet.) No, it’s a paper about contraceptive responsibility, but there are some uncanny parallels that are worth noting. In what follows, I’ll first summarise a couple of the arguments I make in this research article, and then reflect on what this might teach us about coronavirus.